vT,  r.  2,2^ 


JFrtim  ll|p  Htbrarg  of 

Prnffflaor  l^njamtn  l&vnkmvihQt  WutMh 

i&tqntnti^^h  bg  l;tm  to 

ti|p  ICtbrarg  of 

J^nnreton  (Jliwln^tral  S>tmmnt^ 

BX  5937  .T54  .W58  1888 
'^1902^'''''  """^^  Miller,  183oj 
The  world  and  the  kingdom 


BY    THE   SAME   AUTHOR. 


COPY. 

ESSAYS  FROM  AN  EDITOR'S  DRAWER 


RELIGION,   LITERATURE,  AND    LIFE. 

THIRD  EDITION. 
12M0.  CLOTH  BINDING.      PRICE  $L50 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER,  PUBLISHER. 
NEW  YORK 


JTlje  Bisljop  Paliliocft  lectures  (or  \$8S 


The  World  and  the 
Kingdom  ^<:^irif 


HUGH   MILLER  THOMPSON 


BISHOP  OF  MISSISSIPPI 


NEW  YORK 
THOMAS     WHITTAKER 

2    AND    3    BIBLE    HOUSE 
iSSS 


Copyright,  iSSS, 
By  THOMAS  WHITTAKER. 


RAMD  AVEKY   COMl'ANY,   BOSTON, 
MADE  THIS   BOOK. 


THE  BISHOP   PADDOCK   LECTURES. 


In  the  summer  of  the  year  1880,  George  A. 
Jarvis  of  Brooklyn,  N.Y.,  moved  by  his  sense  of 
the  great  good  which  might  thereby  accrue  to 
the  cause  of  Christ,  and  to  the  Church  of  which 
he  was  an  ever-grateful  member,  gave  to  the 
General  Theological  Seminary  of  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church  certain  securities,  exceeding 
in  value  eleven  thousand  dollars,  for  the  founda- 
tion and  maintenance  of  a  Lectureship  in  said 
seminary. 

Out  of  love  to  a  former  pastor  and  enduring 
friend,  the  Right  Rev.  Benjamin  Henry  Paddock, 
D.D.,  Bishop  of  Massachusetts,  he  named  the 
foundation  "  The  Bishop  Paddock  Lecture- 
ship." 

The  deed  of  trust  declares  that,  — 

"The  subjects  of  the  lectures  shall  be  such  as  appertain 
to  the  defence  of  the  religion  of  Jesus  Christ,  as  revealed 

5 


6  THE  BISHOP  PADDOCK  LECTURES. 

in  the  Holy  Bible,  and  illustrated  in  the  Book  of  Common 
Prayer,  against  the  varying  errors  of  the  day,  whether 
materialistic,  rationalistic,  or  professedly  religious,  and 
also  to  its  defence  and  confirmation  in  respect  of  such 
central  truths  as  the  Trmity,  the  Atonement,  Justification, 
and  the  Inspiration  of  the  Word  of  God ;  and  of  such 
central  facts  as  the  Churches  Divine  Order  and  Sacra- 
ments, her  historical  Reformation,  and  her  rights  and 
powers  as  a  pure  and  national  Church.  And  other  sub- 
jects may  be  chosen  if  unanimously  approved  by  the 
Board  of  Appointment  as  being  both  timely  and  also 
within  the  true  intent  of  this  Lectureship." 

Under  the  appointment  of  the  board  created  by 
the  trust,  the  Right  Rev.  Hugh  Miller  Thompson, 
D.D.,  LL.D.,  Bishop  of  Mississippi,  delivered  the 
Lectures  for  the  year  1888,  contained  in  this 
volume. 


PREFATORY  NOTE. 


These  Lectures  are  printed  because  the  conditions 
upon  which  they  were  prepared  and  deUvered  demand 
it,  and  also  because  the  writer  hopes  they  may  be 
found  suggestive,  and  stimulating  (whether  of  agreeing 
or  opposing  thought  is  no  matter),  to  those  for  whom 
the  Lectures  on  this  Foundation  are  primarily  intended 
—  students  and  the  younger  clergy. 

H.  M.  T. 

New  York,  Lent,  i8S8. 


CONTENTS. 


I.  The  Law  of  Growth  .... 

II.  The  Struggle  for  the  Mastery 

III.  The  Step-Child  of  Time  .     .     . 

IV.  The  Child  in  the  Manger  .     . 
V.  The  Seed  growing  secretly 


II 

37 
67 

93 
123 


LECTURE   I. 
THE    LAW    OF  GROWTH. 


Then  said  he.  Unto  what  is  the  kingdom  of  God  like  ?  and  where- 
unto  shall  I  resemble  it  ? 

It  is  like  a  grain  of  mustard  seed,  which  a  man  took,  and  cast  into 
his  garden;  and  it  grew,  and  waxed  a  great  tree;  ajid  the  fowls  of  the 
air  lodged  in  the  branches  of  it. 

And  again  he  said,  Whereiinto  shall  I  liken  the  kingdom  of  God? 

It  is  like  leaven,  which  a  woman  took  and  hid  in  three  jneasures 
of  meal,  till  the  whole  was  leavened. 

St.  Luke  xiii.  1S-21. 


THE  WORLD  AND  THE   KINGDOM. 


LECTURE  I. 
THE   LAW   OF  GROWTH. 

IF  God  is  to  give  a  revelation  of  Divine  knowl- 
edge to  man,  it  must  be  given,  being  what  man 
is,  under  limitations. 

First,  it  must  be  given  in  human  speech.  There 
is,  therefore,  the  Divine  essence  —  the  revelation; 
and  the  human  clothing  of  the  revelation  —  human 
words. 

The  Divine  essence  is  always  the  same.  The 
human  expression  must  necessarily  vary.  Also, 
the  human  expression  may  be  inadequate,  or  even 
erroneous. 

The  Old  Testament  revelation  was  given  in 
Hebrew  words,  the  New  in  Greek.  The  prophet 
or  the  evangelist  used  his  own  language,  and  his 
own  style  in  that  language,  to  express  the  eternal 
verities  revealed  in  his  spirit  by  the  Holy  Ghost. 


14  THE  LAW  OF  GROIVTTI. 

The  doctrine  of  a  verbal  inspiration  was  never 
that  of  the  Church  CathoHc.  It  would  involve  us 
in  this  difficulty,  —  that,  if  words  be  an  essential 
of  the  revelation,  then  the  millions  upon  millions 
of  Christian  men  have  never  read  nor  heard  the 
revelation.  The  great  translations  —  the  Sep- 
tuagint,  the  Latin  Vulgate,  Luther's  German 
Bible,  and  the  noblest  translation  of  them  all, 
the  English  version  of  King  James  —  are,  on 
that  theory,  not  the  revelation  of  God ;  and  only 
here  and  there  a  rare  scholar,  in  all  the  Christian 
centuries,  has  been  able  to  read  the  written  Word 
of  God  in  the  original  Hebrew  or  Greek. 

We  accept  this  condition,  then.  We  have  the 
revelation  in  earthen  vessels.  The  Divine 
thoughts  are  clothed  in  the  speech  of  men,  for 
the  uses  of  men.  So  only  does  God  reach  men, 
by  speaking  in  their  own  poor  finite  speech,  as  a 
mother  speaks  child-talk  to  her  nursling. 

And  the  human  speech  is  always,  perhaps,  in- 
adequate, except  to  express  the  infinite  love  and 
tenderness.  All  human  speech  is  inadequate. 
The  loftiest  words  of  prophet  or  psalmist  sound 
like  broken  words.  They  stumble  and  stagger 
and  groan,  as  it  were,  under  the  burdens  of  the 
infinite  meaning  they  bear. 

Theological  controversies  have   generally  been 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  1 5 

about  the  words,  the  human  covering  of  the 
Divine  revelation.  So  have  come  the  bitterness, 
the  wrath,  and  the  divisions.  "The  letter  kill- 
eth,  the  spirit  giveth  life."  Our  Lord  drew  the 
distinction  clearly  between  the  Divine  essential 
of  the  revelation,  and  the  poor,  small,  human, 
finite  words  in  which  of  necessity,  to  reach  men, 
the  revelation  must  be  clothed. 

But  not  only,  under  the  conditions,  must  a  reve- 
lation be  made  in  human  speech,  and  be  capable 
of  being  put  into  any  form  of  human  speech, 
existing  at  the  time,  or  afterwards  to  exist ;  but 
it  must  be  made  according  to  the  way  of  human 
thinking  at  the  time,  and  among  the  people, 
when  it  is  given,  and  be  capable  of  translation 
into  the  way  of  thinking  and  the  way  of  looking 
at  things  among  people  in  any  age,  and  of  any 
race,  to  the  end  of  time.  Else  it  fails  of  being 
understood. 

The  English  language  contains,  we  believe,  the 
revelation  made  in  Holy  Scripture,  adequately, 
completely.  So  does  the  German,  the  French, 
the  Spanish.  Yet  these  languages  did  not  exist 
when  the  Holy  Scriptures  were  written.  No  man 
doubts  but  that  any  human  speech,  now  existing 
or  hereafter  to  arise,  will  be  competent  to  express 
all  things  necessary  to  man's  salvation. 


l6  THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

The  language  itself  may  even  need  conversion 
to  Christianity,  as  St.  Jerome  converted  the  Latin, 
which  by  nature  knew  no  Christ,  no  Saviour,  and 
no  repentance.  But  as  Latin  was  converted,  every 
tongue  may  be.  All  are  capable  of  conversion, 
as  the  men  who  speak  them  are. 

So  the  way  of  thinking,  of  looking  at  things, 
of  considering  man  and  the  world,  the  past  and 
the  future,  the  beginning  and  the  end,  the  mean- 
ing and  the  purpose,  —  what  we  may  call  philos- 
ophy, —  will  be  always  capable  of  receiving  and 
conveying  and  illustrating  the  truth  of  revelation. 

This  way  of  thinking,  or  philosophy,  varies  as 
language  does,  among  different  people  and  in 
different  ages.  It  may  be  as  strange  and  for- 
eign in  some  cases  as  a  dead  or  foreign  speech : 
nevertheless,  the  Divine  revelation  will  fit  to  what- 
ever truth  there  is  in  it,  will  submit  to  its  meth- 
ods, walk  upon  its  lines,  and  find  itself  in  accord 
and  sympathy  with  whatever  is  real,  genuine,  and 
human  in  it. 

At  the  time  when  our  Lord  was  on  the  earth, 
there  is  no  question  that  the  way  of  looking  at 
things,  —  the  philosophy,  so  called,  —  among 
thinking  and  educated  people,  was  a  more  or 
less  modified  Platonism. 

The    srrcat    Greek   had    influenced   all   serious- 


THE  LAl^  OF  GROWTH.  1 7 

minded  men.  I  have  no  fear  in  saying  that  the 
New  Testament  may  be  truthfully  called  in  some 
respects  Platonic.  I  have  no  timid  concern  to 
explain  away  the  fact  that  St.  Paul's  anthropology 
—  his  way  of  looking  at  man  and  his  nature  as 
three  and  not  two,  as  body,  soul,  and  spirit  —  is 
distinctly  Platonic,  as  a  philosophy.  I  am  not 
concerned,  either,  to  explain  away  the  still  more 
startling  fact,  that  St.  John  in  his  Gospel  uses  a 
Platonic  word  to  express  an  awful  Christian  mys- 
tery ;  and  that  the^oly  Spirit  through  him  names 
the  Jewish  Jehovah  by  the  Greek  and  Platonic 
word  Logos,  and  lifts  it  so  to  heights  of  which 
philosophy  never  dreamed. 

I  say  I  am  not  afraid  nor  concerned ;  because 
with  the  elder  Greek  fathers,  and,  as  I  believe, 
with  St.  John  and  St.  Paul,  I  am  fain  to  think  that 
all  wisdom  comes  from  God,  all  deep,  true,  rever- 
ent, lofty  thinking  rises  through  the  dark  to  the 
light  eternal,  and  that  from  the  seven  lamps  before 
His  awful  throne  faint  gleams  fall  upon  all  souls 
who  are  humbly  trying  to  grope  their  way  along 
those  world's  altar-stairs 

"  That  slope  through  darkness  up  to  God." 

The  truth  in  human  thinking  and  the  truth  in 
God's   revealina:  must   be  the   same  truth.     The 


1 8  THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

eternal  Teacher  of  St.  Clement  of  Alexandria,  who 
teaches  Moses,  teaches  Socrates  also,  and  is  not 
only  the  Logos  of  St,  John,  but  the  Phos,  —  "  the 
true  Light  that  lighteth  every  man  who  comes 
into  the  world." 

One  needs  not  only  to  remember  that  theologi- 
cal controversies  have  been,  I  might  say  largely, 
not  about  the  essence  —  the  Divine  part  —  of  the 
revelation,  but  about  its  finite  human  expression  ; 
but  also,  when  they  have  not  been  about  the  words, 
that  they  have  centred  around  the  philosophy, 
"  the  way  of  looking  at  things,"  that  is. 

It  is  no  exaggeration  to  say  that  half  the  con- 
troversies about  the  deepest  mysteries  of  the  faith 
have  been  really  controversies  between  idealism 
and  sensitism,  realism  and  nominalism,  Plato  and 
Aristotle  the  masters. 

Yet  both  these  find  their  place,  and  both  have 
done  theology  high  service. 

As  a  modern  writer  of  somewhat  shallow  books 
has  somewhat  dramatically  shown,  the  Christian 
Church  after  many  centuries  utilized  a  heathen 
philosopher's  physical  theory  to  explain  the  doc- 
trine of  the  eucharist,  —  Aristotle's  theory  of 
substance  and  accidents,  that  is,  to  explain  and 
justify  the  new  doctrine  of  transubstantiation  in 
the  twelfth  century. 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  1 9 

Aristotle's  physical  theory  has  met  the  common 
fate  of  physical  theories,  and  has  fallen  childish 
now  ;  but  the  metaphysics,  "  the  way  of  looking  at 
things,"  the  philosophy  as  I  call  it,  is  independent 
of  his  physics  ;  and  Platonism  and  Aristotelianism, 
realism  and  nominalism,  have  been  at  the  base  of 
all  theological  controversies  since  the  fourth  cen- 
tury, and  lie  at  the  base  of  all  such  now,  that  have 
any  thinking  or  any  philosophy  at  all. 

That  is,  both  ways  of  thinking  —  any  reasonable, 
reverent,  serious  way  of  considering  mortal  life  at 
all  —  find  the  revelation  capable  of  talking  their 
language  and  going  their  way. 

Truthful,  earnest,  human  thinking,  that  is, 
strikes  an  accordant  note  with  the  Divine  thought 
in  revelation.  Man  is  made  in  the  image  of  God ; 
and  God's  high  thought,  and  man's  poor  small 
thought,  if  it  be  a  true  thought,  are  not  at  enmity, 
but  in  accord. 

Now,  the  way  of  thinking  in  our  own  time,  in 
Europe  and  America,  is  in  some  respects  a  new 
way. 

It  has  arisen  from  the  study  and  investigation 
of  physical  phenomena,  which  have  never  been  so 
enthusiastically  pursued  as  now. 

When  we  examine  closely  as  to  actual  attain- 
ment in  those  studies,  we  find  that,  after  all,  our 


20  THE  LAW  OF  GROWTIL 

gains  nave  not  been  great.  The  human  mind  has 
driven  up  at  every  turn  against  the  profound  dark 
of  the  unknown.  The  advances  we  have  made 
have  not  been  in  knowing  the  essence  of  things, 
but  in  increased  skill  and  facility  in  handling  and 
using  powers  of  which  we  absolutely  know  nothing 
in  themselves. 

We  make  the  lightning,  it  is  said,  run  our 
errands  and  light  our  streets  ;  but  we  are  as  pro- 
foundly ignorant  of  what  electricity  is,  as  ever. 
Our  advances  and  advantages  have  been  gained 
for  us  rather  by  the  practical  men  who  did  not 
waste  their  time  in  studying  the  science  of  the 
subject,  but  who  set  to  work  at  once  utilizing  their 
material,  content  to  let  its  essence  remain  un- 
known. 

From  the  locomotive-engine,  the  telephone  and 
the  telegraph,  to  the  reaping-machine,  it  is  mar- 
vellously little  we  owe  to  the  scientific  people. 
The  inventor  of  the  steam-engine  did  not  trouble 
himself  about  the  correlation  or  conservation  of 
energy,  indeed,  knew  nothing  about  them  under 
such  names ;  and  the  inventor  of  the  electric 
telegraph  was  content  in  his  ignorance  to  call 
electricity  a  fluid,  use  it  as  he  could,  and  let  the 
rest  go. 

The   leavening   of   our  daily  bread    is  a  thing 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  21 

familiar  in  all  kitchens,  and  has  so  been  for  several 
thousand  years  ;  but  our  most  learned  chemists  are 
disputing  yet  over  at  least  three  theories  of  the 
process.  The  unscientific  baker  happily  does  not 
trouble  himself  about  the  science  of  the  subject, 
else  we  should  have  no  rolls  for  our  breakfast. 

Irii  a  confused  and  wild  way  of  writing  and  talk- 
ing which  has  become  too  common,  people  have 
gotten  the  notion  that  we  have  mastered  the 
secrets  of  nature,  have  discovered  nearly  all  things 
unknown,  and  that  our  scientific  men  can  explain 
every  thing  in  nature. 

On  closer  examination  we  find  that  we  have 
discovered  amazingly  little ;  that  the  great  mother 
veils  her  face,  and  wraps  the  sombre  drapery  about 
her  stately  form,  and  declines  to  be  interviewed 
by  no  matter  what  scientific  committee. 

A  certain  uneasiness,  it  must  be  confessed, 
existed  a  while  since,  under  the  fancy  that  our 
discoveries  in  science  had  become  so  great  that 
religion  and  Almighty  God  might  be  found  the 
superfluous  myths  of  an  ignorant  past.  And  so 
arose  a  considerable  literature  concerned  about 
the  reconciling  of  religion  and  science, — a  litera- 
ture, I  venture  to  say,  such  as  our  children  will 
look  back  upon  with  little  reverence  for  the  wis- 
dom of  their  fathers  ;  a  literature  where  religion 


22  THE   LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

and  science  were  both  at  their  weakest,  and  men 
were  trying  to  apologize  to  the  temporary  theo- 
ries of  an  hour,  to  the  finder  of  a  flint  arrovv-hcad 
or  a  human  skull,  for  their  belief  in  Almighty 
God,  and  eternal  righteousness,  and  the  awful 
mystery  of  human  life ;  a  literature  only  to  be 
compared  with  its  opposite,  —  that  in  which  every 
experimentalist  who  had  discovered  a  new  microbe 
or  a  new  chemical  compound  felt  himself  at  once 
qualified  to  declare  the  throne  of  the  universe 
vacant,  and  himself  capable  of  explaining  and 
accounting  for  all  things  seen  and  unseen. 

Such  literatures,  pitiful  and  sad  in  the  insin- 
cerity and  abject  fear  of  the  one,  and  in  the  con- 
ceit and  impertinence  of  the  other,  were  cast  up 
like  scum  and  froth  upon  the  surface,  in  the  first 
ferment  of  an  ignorant  age  just  entering  upon 
somewhat  larger  knowledge,  —  the  bubbles  of  its 
sophomoric  vanity.  They  will  be  both  curious 
studies  in  psychology  to  the  men  of  the  twentieth 
century ! 

But  the  tide  is  already  on  the  turn.  We  find, 
after  all  our  boasting,  that  the  world  still  remains 
where  it  was,  and  that  the  old  secrets  of  the  eter- 
nal stars  and  the  gray  deeps  remain  secrets  still ; 
and  our  more  modest  Science  folds  her  hands 
before   the   sphinx,  and   confesses   that   she   has 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  23 

never  seen  and  is  now  quite  sure  she  never  can 
see  any  thing  as  it  is,  but  only  as  it  seems :  her 
field  is  phenomena,  not  reality.  She  sees  that  the 
grass  is  green ;  but  why  it  is  green,  what  makes 
it  green,  whether  the  green  is  in  her  eye  or  in 
the  grass,  what,  in  fact,  green  is,  all  the  scientists 
in  Europe  and  America  are  as  ignorant  about  as 
their  hide-clad  ancestors  in  the  time  of  Ccesar. 

But  while  the  study  of  phenomena  has  never 
revealed  to  us  any  thing  but  phenomena,  it  has 
originated  a  philosophy,  a  metaphysics,  a  way  of 
looking  at  things,  which  is  peculiar  to  our  time, 
and  has  its  influence  upon  all  thinking  people. 

In  plain  English,  that  way  is  about  this  :  That  v/. 
things  grozv ;  that  an  oak-tree  presupposes  an 
acorn,  a  chick  an  Q.gg,  an  apple  an  apple-tree ; 
that  an  effect  has  a  cause ;  that  things  come 
regularly  and  in  order  ;  that  beginnings  of  great 
things  are  very  small  things  ;  that  there  are 
germs  for  all  results ;  in  fact,  that  "  great  oaks 
from  little  acorns  grow,"  according  to  the  old 
child  rhyme ;  that  all  to-days  are  the  children  of 
yesterdays ;  that  you  can  depend  upon  things, 
therefore ;  that  law  is  uniform  ;  that,  as  the  wise 
man  said  long  ago,  "  There  is  nothing  new  under 
the  sun  ;"  that  times  go  by  turns,  and  the  world 
is  a  world  of  sowings  and  of  harvests. 


24  THE   LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

Though  the  doctrine  be  announced  in  sounding 
phrase  and  learned  majesty,  and  call  itself  devel- 
opment, evolution,  or  what  not,  that  is  really  what 
it  is  in  English, — not  very  wonderful,  after  all, 
nor  very  formidable,  and  certainly  thoroughly  in 
accord  with  revelation  up  to  this  point.  The 
addition  made  to  it,  that  all  this  order  and  rule, 
these  germs  and  growths,  came  by  chance,  is  not 
of  course  Christian  ;  but  also  it  is  not  science. 

Our  scientific  people  have  found  this  theory 
an  admirable  working  hypothesis,  at  all  events. 
It  is  a  safe  theory  to  go  upon  in  the  study  of  phe- 
nomena. One  phenomenon  is  always  supposed  to 
be  caused  by  another.  The  germ  of  any  thing  is 
to  be  supposed,  sought  for,  whether  it  be  the  germ 
of  a  world,  or  the  germ  in  a  case  of  cholera.  And 
good  results  may  come  to  men  from  finding  the 
germ  of  cholera,  and  killing  it,  or  finding  the  germ 
of  a  newer  and  better  world,  and  caring  for  and 
fostering  it.  For  we  do  not  want  cholera,  and  we 
do  want  a  new  and  better  world. 

Now,  does  revelation  find  itself  at  discord  with 
this  philosophy .-'  Or  can  it  express  itself  ^nd 
make  itself  understood,  explain  and  illustrate 
itself,  in  the  language  of  our  modern  way  of 
thinking }  Is  it  in  accord  with  the  spirit  of  our 
time,  as  it  has  been  with  that  of  other  times  in 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  2$ 

which  it  has  given  light  and  leading  to  the  souls 
of  men  ? 

It  is  certainly  a  very  different  way  of  thinking 
from  that  of  the  last  century.  We  had  a  brass-  ,^  ^ 
clock  world  then,  wound  up  some  thousands  of 
years  ago,  and  running  by  its  original  momentum 
ever  since.  The  Maker  occasionally  interfered 
in  the  way  of  what  were  called  special  provi- 
dences, when  the  machine  got  some  people  into 
difficulties,  so  the  religious  folk  honestly  believed 
and  prayed  ;  but  really  the  scientific  people  had 
found  out  so  much,  as  they  thought,  about  what 
they  were  pleased  to  call  the  laws  of  nature,  that 
after  the  machine  was  once  started,  there  did  not 
seem  to  science  nor  to  religion  either  any  neces- 
sity for  a  God,  except  to  regulate  the  machine 
occasionally.  The  general  idea,  I  think,  was,  that 
He  had  gone  off,  and  was  taking  His  ease,  well 
pleased  with  His  work  which  He  had  pronounced 
"good,"  and  would  not  do  much  in  any  case,  and 
generally  ought  not  to  be  expected  to  do  much, 
even  for  the  elect,  till  the  time  came  for  Him  to 
break  the  machine  all  to  pieces  and  burn  it  up. 

And  yet  men  could  devoutly  read  and  believe 
their  Bibles,  and  find  something  in  them  to  accord 
with  even  such  a  poor,  shallow,  mechanic  theory 
as   this !     We    certainly  owe  it  to    our  scientific 


26  THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

people,  that  they  have  made  such  a  theory  of  the 
world  forever  impossible  among  thinking  peoj^le. 
Whether  their  own  theory  may  not  be  sent  to 
keep  it  company  by  the  scientific  people  of  the 
twentieth  century,  is  of  no  special  consequence 
to  anybody. 

"  Our  little  systems  have  their  day, 
They  have  their  day,  and  cease  to  be." 

The  verities  and  realities  remain  the  same. 

But  we  may  safely  say  that  if  Christian  men 
could  find  the  formulas  of  such  a  theory  fit  for 
their  use,  and  even  helpful,  as  they  surely  were, 
to  the  steadfastness  of  their  faith  and  the  comfort 
of  their  hope,  they  now  need  fear  neither  the  lan- 
guage nor  the  formulas  of  any  philosophic  theory 
whatsoever. 

Turning  to  the  philosophy,  if  we  may  so  call  it, 
of  our  own  time,  and  its  relation  to  revelation,  one 
is  struck  with  two  facts  in  the  New  Testament : 
first,  the  underlying  doctrine  of  the  uniformity  of 
natural  and  spiritual  processes  ;  and,  second,  that 
development  is  the  law  of  the  spiritual  kingdom. 

The  teaching  of  our  Lord  was  by  parable. 
"Without  a  parable  spake  he  not  unto  them." 
Now,  underlying  every  parable  is  the  doctrine 
that   the    same   law  holds   and   the    same   power 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  2/ 

works  in  the  spiritual  as  in  the  material.  Other- 
wise there  could  be  no  teaching  by  parable  at  all. 
"Consider  the  lilies,  how  they  grow."  What 
point  in  that,  unless  the  Lord  of  the  lily  is  the 
Lord  also  of  the  man,  unless  the  law  of  lily 
growth  and  care  be  the  law  also  of  human  growth 
and  human  care  .<* 

"A  sower  went  forth  to  sow."  He  is  type  of 
the  Lord  Himself.  But  there  is  no  meaning  in 
it  unless  all  seed-growth  be  the  same.  The  law 
by  which  the  sparrow  lives  is  the  law  also  by 
which  the  archangel  lives.  The  stars  in  their 
courses  are  ruled  by  the  same  hand  that  feeds 
the  ravens.  In  every  parable  the  Lord  assumes 
the  sameness  of  the  Worker  and  the  sameness 
of  the  law  by  which  He  works,  in  the  natural 
and  in  the  spiritual  both. 

You  may  be  perfectly  familiar  with  this  line  of 
thought ;  and  yet  I  must  emphasize  it,  because, 
in  my  reading  at  least,  I  have  not  found  it  in 
discussions  upon  the  parables  sufficiently  dwelt 
upon.  The  whole  possibility  of  the  teaching  by 
parable  rests  upon  the  assumption  that  the  law  is 
the  same  in  the  spiritual  and  the  material  world  ; 
that  out  of  the  darkness  sweeps  one  small  seg- 
ment of  a  measureless  circle,  but  that  small 
segment,  understood  and  measured,  will  give  us 


28  THE  LAW  OF  GROIVTIT. 

the  magnificent  curve  of  law  which  encloses  the 
earth  and  hell  and  heaven,  and  touches  the 
throne  of  God. 

The  Christian  man  calls  it  the  will  of  God,  the 
uniform  energy  of  the  unchangeable  Lord,  who 
is  present,  immanent,  creative  in  all  worlds,  and 
the  same  in  all,  so  that  His  working  in  the  lowest 
explains  His  working  in  the  highest,  since  "  in 
Him  is  no  variableness,  neither  shadow  of  turn- 
ing." 

The  scientific  man  calls  it  the  uniformity  of 
law,  or  any  name  he  pleases.  The  fact  is  the 
same  under  any  name.  But  surely  the  revelation 
of  "  Him  who  changeth  not,"  the  Lord  "  who  is 
the  same  yesterday,  to-day,  and  forever,"  has  no 
quarrel  with  a  theory  which  declares  that  Science 
has  at  last  discovered,  in  her  poor  way,  what  that 
revelation  proclaimed  forty  centuries  ago,  and 
which,  eighteen  centuries  since,  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  took  as  the  foundation  of  that  most  touch- 
ing, tender,  and  wonderful  of  all  teaching,  —  the 
teaching  by  parable,  when  He  spake  as  never 
man  spake,  and  baptized  our  poor,  old,  common- 
place world  with  the  light  that  belonged  to  it  too, 
the  one  light  and  the  one  law  of  the  Father  who 
is  in  earth  and  heaven  and  hell  the  same. 

But  again,  in  the  case   of   His  own   kingdom. 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  29 

which  He  has  come  to  preach  and  establish,  He 
makes  the  law  of  its  growth  always  a  development. 

It  leads  to  much  that  it  will  be  wholesome  to 
ponder  on  :  that  this  law  should  be  plainly  an- 
nounced, and  lie  upon  the  pages  of  the  New 
Testament,  and  be  publicly  read  and  preached 
for  eighteen  centuries  as  the  law  of  the  eternal 
and  spiritual  kingdom ;  and  that  after  those  cen- 
turies it  should  be  at  last  discovered,  as  a  sort 
of  triumph  of  human  reasoning,  to  be  the  law  of 
the  temporal  and  phenomenal,  or  what  we  call 
natural,  kingdom  also  ! 

"  The  kingdom  of  heaven  cometh  not  with  ob- 
servation." "First  the  blade,  then  the  ear,  then 
the  full  corn  in  the  ear."  "The  kingdom  of 
heaven  is  like  a  grain  of  mustard-seed,  which  a 
man  cast  into  his  garden  ;  and  it  grew,  and  waxed 
a  great  tree,  and  the  fowls  of  the  air  came  and 
lodged  in  the  branches."  "The  kingdom  of  God 
is  like  leaven,  which  a  woman  took  and  hid  in 
three  measures  of  meal,  till  the  whole  was 
leavened." 

Here  is  plainly  laid  down  the  law  of  seeds  and 
germs  and  cells,  of  silent  growth  and  unnoticed 
working,  of  development  from  the  little  to  the 
great,  of  life  organizing  itself  out  of  the  dark, 
of  development  from  the  germ. 


30  THE  LAW  OF  GROWTIL 

And  this  is  declared  to  be  the  way  and  order 
of  growth,  not  only  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven  in 
its  outward  organized  appearance,  but  in  its 
inner  spiritual  nature,  growing  in  the  heart  of 
a  man.  "The  kingdom  of  heaven  is  within  you." 
But,  indeed,  need  we  be  surprised }  since,  going 
to  the  very  beginning,  we  find  this :  "  I  will 
put  enmity  between  thee  and  the  woman,  be- 
tween thy  seed  and  her  seed.  It  shall  bruise 
thy  head."  It  was  a  small  germ  enough,  —  such 
a  promise ;  but  out  of  it  grew  the  Jewish  Church, 
the  Law  of  Moses  and  the  Psalms  of  David,  the 
prophecies  of  Isaiah,  the  Temple  of  Solomon, 
the  Four  Gospels,  at  last  all  sacraments  and 
liturgies,  all  theologies,  all  churches,  and  all 
missions. 

A  child  lies  in  the  feeding-trough  of  the  khan 
at  Bethlehem.  There  was  another  beginning 
and  another  germ,  small  enough,  humble  enough, 
in  the  manger.  But  the  manger  held  a  Roman 
Empire  converted,  the  civilization  of  the  rulers 
of  the  coming  world,  the  art  of  Italy,  the  law 
and  literature  of  Europe,  the  poems  of  Shak- 
speare,  the  discovery  of  America. 

The  mustard  -  seed  grows,  the  leaven  works 
unseen.  The  whole  history,  like  the  whole 
teaching,  is  of  germs  of  life  and  vital  seed  dcvcl- 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  3 1 

oping,  as  all  things  grow  in  nature,  noiselessly, 
invisibly,  by  the  will  and  power  of  God. 

The  theology  of  the  Catholic  Church,  I  need 
scarcely  remind  you,  has  always  been  in  accord 
with  the  Lord's  teaching  in  this  matter.  The 
spiritual  life,  in  her  view,  has  always  come  from 
an  implanted  germ  in  the  individual  soul.  Her 
position  herein  has  been  assailed,  and  some- 
times blindly  and  bitterly ;  but  she  has  never 
faltered  in  her  allegiance  to  the  Master's  teach- 
ing. The  germ  sown  in  holy  baptism  she  sowed 
in  His  name  in  faith  and  prayer,  and  looked  to 
see  develop  after  its  kind,  "first  the  blade,  then 
the  ear,  then  the  full  corn  in  the  ear."  She  has 
not  looked  to  convert  the  world  by  cyclones  of 
religious  fervor,  though  cyclones  have  their  place, 
nor  to  bring  in  the  kingdom  with  drum-roll  and 
trumpet-blare.  She  has  followed  and  believed  in 
the  power  of  patient  culture,  of  slow  growth,  of 
watchful  care,  of  hereditary  faith,  of  household 
sanctities,  of  a  mother's  crooning  cradle-hymn, 
of  a  father's  prayers,  of  a  faithful  pastor's  watch 
and  guard,  of  catechizing  and  creed  teaching,  of 
a  religion  that  forms  character  and  grows  into 
life  by  the  fireside,  in  the  school,  in  the  Church, 
among  baptized  children. 

And  in  all   this   she   has  walked  with   human 


32  THE   LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

wisdom  and  science,  as  with  divine.  Other  the- 
ories have  been  noisy,  aggressive,  condemnatory. 
But  Wisdom  is  justified  of  all  her  children:  and 
thoughtful  people  are  fast  seeing  that  here,  too, 
the  growth  is  by  order  and  law  ;  that  character 
comes  from  seed  sown  and  developed  in  fitting 
seed-beds;  and  that  the  grandest  growth, — the 
growth  of  a  Christian  man, — like  the  growth  of 
a  lichen,  is  a  growth  by  a  fixed  order  which  we 
can  understand  and  provide  for. 

Consider,  then,  with  me,  what  should  be  our 
attitude,  as  Christian  men,  toward  the  way  of 
thinking  of  our  time. 

We  must  live  in  our  own  time.  We  may  mourn 
for  the  "ages  of  faith,"  as  some  have  called  them, 
but  it  is  an  unreasonable  and  weak  regret.  The 
past  has  gone  into  the  darkness  of  its  dead  years, 
and  taken  with  it  its  own  difficulties  and  its  own 
advantages.  Our  age  is  no  less  a  day  of  God  than 
any  past,  and  it  is  clear  that  a  man  must  do  his 
work,  and  fail  or  triumph,  for  his  own  generation. 
Whether  or  no,  we  are  dominated  by  what  the 
Germans  call  the  "  Zeit-Gcist,''  —  the  spirit  of  our 
day.  He  is  somewhat  of  a  fantastic  oddity  who 
thinks  to  live  outside  it,  or  to  wall  it  out ;  and  he 
is  scarce  a  believer  in  a  living  God  if  he  do  not 
accept  his  own  century  for  as  good  and  blessed 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  33 

and  divine  a  century  as  any  in  whicli  God  has 
reigned. 

Men  of  the  day,  we  are  in  the  tide  of  the 
thoughts  of  our  day.  It  is  where  God  has  placed 
us.  Let  us  humbly  thank  Him  therefor,  and  do 
the  work  that  is  our  own  and  no  man's  else. 

This  attitude  accepts  gladly  and  thankfully  all 
discoveries,  all  advance  in  knowledge,  all  honest, 
helpful,  serious  thinking  which  clears  difficulties 
and  brings  light.  Believing  in  God,  it  not  only 
tolerates  but  welcomes  any  fact  or  truth  of  God's, 
working  reverently,  thankfully,  and  fearlessly. 

The  truth  or  fact  will  find  its  place  at  last  built 
into  the  temple  of  God,  a  carved  stone  for  some 
column,  or  an  ashlar  for  some  buttress. 

Draw  a  broad  distinction  between  the  revelation, 
and  our  poor  human  inferences  therefrom.  Do 
not  fear  lest,  when  any  theory  of  ours  about  reli- 
gion is  made  untenable,  that  therefore  religion  is 
henceforth  impossible. 

There  is  no  threatened  destruction  of  our 
divine  religion,  no  breach  in  its  walls,  no  crumbling 
of  its  towers.  Man  is  a  religious  animal.  What- 
ever else  he  is  or  is  not,  he  is  that.  However  you 
may  explain  his  becoming  so,  that  is  the  fact, 
—  just  as  scientific  and  unquestionable  a  fact  as 
the  Pacific  Ocean,  and  the  Isthmus  of  Panama. 


34  THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH. 

It  Stands  facing  all  theories,  with  unblenching 
eyes. 

And  another  fact  stands  equally  a  matter  of 
science,  and  equally  unassailable  :  that,  whereso- 
ever He  has  been  presented  to  that  instinct  in 
man,  Jesus  of  Nazareth  has  been  accepted  as  its 
satisfaction  and  completion,  as  the  incarnate  ful- 
filment of  all  human  ideals,  and  the  Mediator  and 
Daysman  between  man  and  God. 

The  Catholic  faith  is  a  religion  of  facts,  not 
of  speculations.  For  Christ  is  His  own  religion, 
Christ  is  Christianity.  And  that  faith  is  corre- 
lated to  other  facts,  to  the  world,  and  to  man. 
Here  lies  the  heart  of  the  whole  ;  and  a  scientific 
religion  can  be  built,  if  itr  be  worth  while,  upon 
this, — Jesus  Christ  Himself,  however,  the  corner- 
stone. 

It  is  my  purpose,  in  these  lectures,  to  look  at 
certain  matters  of  religion  and  the  Church  of  God 
in  the  lights  of  our  own  time  ;  to  go  with,  in  some 
important  respects,  and  not  against,  the  way  of 
thinking  about  us.  I  think  we  shall  find  some 
things  clearer  by  that  method  ;  at  all  events,  that 
we  can  use  the  language  of  our  day  reverently  and 
fearlessly  upon  the  sacred  mysteries  of  our  faith, 
and  think  upon  the  loftiest  things  in  the  way  men 
think  upon  the  lowest.     But,  O  Light  and  Love 


THE  LAW  OF  GROWTH.  35 

divine !  without  whom  no  sparrow  falls,  nor  any- 
star  burns  out  into  the  dark,  how  know  we  what 
is  lofty  and  what  is  lowly,  in  ourselves,  in  Thy 
worlds,  or  in  Thee  ?  One  thing  we  know :  that 
Thou  changest  not,  that  Thy  Almighty  love  and 
care  are  over  all  Thy  children,  and  all  the  work  of 
Thy  hands,  and  that  Thy  works  reveal  Thee  and 
praise  Thee,  whether  they  be  the  morning  stars 
that  sing  together  when  a  world  is  born,  or  an 
insect  that  hums  in  the  noonday  beam. 

Along  the  winding  shores  of  the  blue  yEgean 
went  from  echoing  cliff  to  cliff  the  cry  one  day, 
"  Great  Pan  is  dead  !  "  And  the  Dryads  heard  it 
in  the  wood,  and  the  Nymphs  by  the  fountains 
uttered  it,  and  fled  from  classic  stream  and  hill 
and  headland.     A  religion  died. 

And  later,  once  again,  a  cry  more  mournful 
moaned  among  the  rocking  pines  and  along  the 
desolate  fiords  of  the  North,  "  Balder  is  dead. 
Balder  the  beautiful !  "  And  Odin  and  Thor  and 
mother  Freya  faded  into  the  gray  mists  of  their 
dim  Walhalla  forever.  A  religion  died. 
^  Yes,  religions  have  died.  But  they  die  before 
the  face  of  the  white  Christ,  who  died  to  conquer, 
and  rose  again,  and  is  alive  for  evermore,  King  of 
kings,  and  Lord  of  lords. 


LECTURE  II. 
THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  THE  MASTERY. 


And  God  blessed  them,  and  God  said  Jtnto  them,  Be  fruitful 
and  multiply,  and  replenish  the  earth,  and  subdue  it. 

Gen.  i.  2S. 

And  I  will  put  enmity  between  thee  and  the  woman,  and  betiveen 

thy  seed  and  her  seed ;  it  shall  bruise  thy  head,  and  thou  shall  bruise 

his  heel. 

Gen.  iii.  15. 

Attd  unto  Adam  He  said,  .  .  .  Cursed  is  the  ground  for  thy 
sake  ;  in  sorrow  shalt  thou  eat  of  it  all  the  days  of  thy  life.  Thorns 
also  and  thistles  shall  it  bring  forth  to  thee  ;  and  thou  shalt  eat  the 
herb  of  the  f  eld.  In  the  siveat  of  thy  face  shalt  thou  eat  bread,  till 
thou  return  unto  the  ground ;  for  out  of  it  wast  thou  taken :  for  dust 
thou  art,  and  unto  dust  shalt  thou  return. 

Gen.  iii.  17-19. 


LECTURE   II. 

THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  THE  MASTERY. 

1\  /TAN  stood  an  exile  at  the  gate  of  Eden. 
^^-^  There  had  been  a  duty  given,  and  now 
also  there  is  a  promise,  "  Replenish  the  earth, 
and  subdue  it,"  was  the  command.  "  The  seed 
of  the  woman  shall  bruise  the  head  of  the  ser- 
pent," is  the  promise,  in  the  face  of  the  admitted 
evil. 

Here  is  the  revealed  starting-point  of  human 
history.  Admit  the  mystery  and  the  dimness  of 
the  making  and  the  fall ;  here,  at  least,  is  a 
beginning  which  has  a  rational  and  scientific 
possibility. 

Man  stands  facing  a  wild  world,  —  a  world  of 
briers  and  thorns,  of  hostile  powers  and  manifes- 
tations, a  world  of  frosts  and  fires,  of  tempests 
and  hail,  of  earthquakes,  lightnings,  and  volca- 
noes, of  evil  beasts  and  evil  airs,  of  pestilent 
swamp  and  reeking  morass,  of  floods  and 
droughts, — and  he  is  told  to  master  it.     It  is  the 

39 


40  THE  STRUGGLE   FOR    THE   MASTERY. 

charter  by  which  he  holds  his  place  upon  it,  that 
he  is  subduing  it. 

And  face  to  face  with  evil  in  this  guise, — the 
evil  of  apparently  lawless  power,  unsubdued  to 
rationality  and  sweet  human  use, — there  comes 
to  him  the  warning,  "  It  shall  bruise  thy  heel." 
"Thorns  also  and  thistles  shall  it  bring  forth  to 
thee."  There  will  be  sore  toil  and  pain.  The 
years  shall  be  gloomed  with  darkness,  and  their 
days  and  nights  thick  with  human  cries  and  tears. 
Thy  feet  will  be  wounded  on  the  flints,  and  thy 
hands  torn  with  the  thorns.  Thou  shalt  be  heavy 
burdened  and  sore  smitten  all  thy  years,  and  die, 
and  make  a  passage  with  thy  bleaching  bones  for 
thy  children's  children  to  march  over.  Sickness 
and  sorrow  and  death  shall  be  thine,  and  thou 
shalt  fail  and  perish,  and  in  thy  day  see  no  sign. 
But  the  end  is  sure.  "Thou  shalt  bruise  his 
head."  The  seed  of  the  woman  shall  triumph. 
Evil,  typified  by  the  serpent,  even  in  its  outward 
manifestation  of  material  unrest  and  unreason, 
shall  be  trampled  down.  The  mother's  son  shall 
stand  at  last,  bruised,  wounded,  bleeding,  but  vic- 
tor, with  the  conquering  heel  upon  the  serpent's 
crest,  the  world's  master,  and  his  own,  because 
the  son  of  the  woman  is  also  the  Son  of  God. 

It  is  the  reading  of  all  the  myths.     We  might 


THE  STRUGGLE   FOR    THE  MASTERY.         4 1 

expect  it  so.  If,  as  is  most  rational  to  believe, 
all  myths  are  shadowy  remembrances  of  a  primal 
reality,  —  the  common  knowledge  and  faith  of  the 
race  before  it  was  scattered,  —  there  is  a  satisfac- 
tory explanation.  But  even  if  myths  be  but  the 
common  expression  of  the  common  experience  of 
humanity  struggling  with  its  environment,  the 
sameness  is  accounted  for. 

The  giants  of  the  frosts  and  the  fires,  with 
which  our  Norse  forefathers  believed  the  children 
of  the  East  —  the  Aeser  —  wrestled  in  sore  pain, 
and  held  subdued  by  force  of  hourly  vigilance  and 
straining  strength,  are  only  other  names  for  the 
fiercer  and  more  malignant  Rakshasas  of  India, 
ao:ainst  whom  men  and  Indra  strive  without 
ceasing. 

But,  myths  apart,  it  is  the  fact  of  history,  and 
now,  at  last,  the  proclamation  of  science. 

From  the  gray  dawn  of  his  birth,  as  far  as  we 
have  history  of  him  in  any  shape  at  all,  man  has 
been  at  spear's  point  with  the  world.  He  has 
held  his  own  in  it  everywhere  and  always  by  the 
strong  hand.  Relax  his  struggle,  sleep  on  his 
watch,  and  he  sinks  to  the  savage,  half  way  to 
the  brute.  He  tames  the  world,  or  the  world 
imbrutes  him.  There  has  never  been  any  other 
issue  from  the  north  pole  to  the  south,  with  white 


42  THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

man  or  black  man.  Man,  to  be  a  man,  must 
subdue  his  environment. 

It  is  the  dream  of  a  fantastic  and  sickly  senti- 
mentality, that  man  lives  well  when  he  lives  in 
peace  with  Nature.  She  has  marshes  to  drain ; 
he  must  drain  them,  or  die  of  malaria.  She  has 
forests  to  be  felled,  burned  up,  rooted  away,  or  he 
stances.  She  has  rivers  to  wall  in,  or  his  harvests 
and  his  house  are  swept  away.  She  has  seas  to 
wall  out,  or  he  must  blot  brave  Holland  from  ex- 
istence, and  many  a  fair  green  land  beside.  She 
has  tides  and  tempestuous  seas  and  the  shattering 
surge  upon  the  harbor-bar  to  master,  or  he  is  cut 
off  from  his  kind.  She  has  mountain-sides  into 
which  he  must  rend  and  hammer  his  way,  or  he 
has  no  temples  for  his  God  and  no  palaces  for  his 
king.  She  has  caverns  to  be  searched  with  fire 
and  iron,  or  he  has  no  plough  for  his  fields  and  no 
embers  upon  his  hearth.  He  must  delve  and 
trench  and  carve,  must  tear  and  trample  and 
bum,  wall  out  and  wall  in,  and  be  master  above 
and  below^,  in  water,  in  earth,  and  in  air,  or  he  can 
have  no  London  and  no  New  York. 

He  builds  a  cathedral  because  he  has  subdued 
He  gets  his  dinner  because  he  has  subdued,  also. 
He  builds  a  palace  for  his  learning  or  his  law, 
because  in  so  far  as  he  has  mastered.     He  builds 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         43 

a  cottage  in  his  little  field  on  the  same  condition. 
The  Capitol  in  Washington  is  a  symbol  of  his 
triumph.  The  log  cabin  in  a  Western  clearing 
attests  also  the  presence  of  the  world-subduer. 

Here  is  a  creature,  the  weakest  and  tenderest 
of  all  things  animal  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  \^-ith 
neither  teeth  nor  claws  to  rend,  nor  fur  nor 
feather  to  cover  him,,  who  can  neither  fight  nor 
run  nor  hide,  can  neither  plunge  into  the  water 
nor  soar  into  the  air,  whom  the  sun  bums  and 
the  cold  freezes ;  and  this  creature  accepts  the 
situation,  and  fights  the  world  in  which  he  lives 
tooth  and  nail  for  breathing-room  and  his  dinner 
to  begin  with,  and  then,  flushed  with  his  victor}-, 
declines  to  make  peace  on  any  terms  save  final 
abject  surrender,  heel  on  head, — tired,  wounded, 
aching,  bleeding,  but  heel  on  head,  —  so  only  will 
he  stand  when  his  highest  consciousness  wakens, 
—  the  savant  just  as  fierce  and  tireless  for  new 
\*ictories  in  knowledge,  and  new  grasps  upon 
Nature's  powers,  as  the  hungr)-  savage  for  the 
roots  or  prey  that  will  supply  his  wigwam.  And 
now  science,  as  it  is  called,  comes,  and  repeats  in 
its  language,  as  if  it  were  a  new  discover)-  of  its 
own,  the  old  statement  of  the  law  of  human  posi- 
tion in  the  world,  declared  in  Genesis,  shadowed 
dimly  in   ever}-  myth,  faint   echo   of  the  primal 


44    THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

experience  and  the  primal  command,  and  told  on 
every  page  of  human  story  where  there  are  pages 
at  all ! 

"Developing?"  Yes,  developing  since  the 
dawn !  Always  developing,  that  is  the  story  of 
the  race.  Developing  from  what?  Upon  that, 
all  science  is  dumb.  You  may  guess,  and  your 
guess  may  be  right  or  wrong,  but  it  is  only  a 
guess.  The  known  fact  is,  that  whenever  man  is 
found  in  history,  on  the  book  page,  on  the  clay 
cylinder,  on  the  hieroglyphic  monolith,  in  the  cave 
drift,  he  is  always  developing,  and  developing  by 
fighting  his  surroundings.  Developing  to  what  ? 
Again  science  only  guesses. 

Not  a  beast  of  prey,  he  is  always  in  battle. 
His  story  in  Genesis  and  his  story  in  the  Pyra- 
mids, his  story  in  the  Abbeville  caves  and  his 
story  on  the  Acropolis  of  Athens,  is  the  story  of 
a  creature  always  fighting,  always  wounded,  and 
yet  always  victorious. 

It  is  not  a  story  of  uniform  victory.  There  are 
repulses  and  defeats  all  along  the  line  now  and 
then.  Here  and  there  even  a  whole  wing  gives 
way  and  falls  to  the  rear, — a  false  development 
perishes,  —  but  the  march  is  straight  on,  of  the 
whole  army.  Putting  aside  guesses,  fantastic 
speculations  and  dreams  of  the  scientific  or  other 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         45 

imagination,  the  visible  fact  is,  that,  whenever  we 
deal  with  facts,  man  is  steadily  advancing,  steadily- 
conquering,  steadily  developing,  and  more  and 
more  subduing  the  world. 

And  mark  here,  that  this  development  does  not 
come  from  any  struggle  for  existence  merely.  In 
man's  case  it  is  a  struggle  for  mastery,  rather 
than  a  struggle  to  be.  In  other  cases,  the  exist- 
ence secured,  the  creature  is  at  peace  with  the 
environment.  The  fish  does  not  fight  the  sea. 
The  eagle  accepts  the  air.  The  tiger  is  content 
with  the  jungle.  Suppose  their  development,  up 
to  this  point,  due  to  struggle  with  the  environ- 
ment for  existence ;  having  reached  it,  there  is  no 
effort  further. 

The  strange,  unique  position  of  man  with  refer- 
ence to  his  environment  is  that  he  declines  to 
accept  it,  declines  to  consider  it  final ;  absolutely 
objects  to  sea  and  sky  and  land,  to  mountain, 
valley,  or  stream,  until  each  has  submitted  to  him 
and  confesses  him  master.  He  refuses  to  com- 
promise with  the  lightning  after  he  has  made  it 
harmless  to  his  roof.  He  declines  to  rest  content 
with  Franklin's  truce.  He  insists  on  collaring  it 
with  iron,  and  sending  it  round  the  world  on  his 
errands,  labelled  with  his  name. 

His  position  toward  his  environment  has  been 


46    THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

always  that  of  conscious  opposition.  We  say  he 
becomes  accustomed  to  the  heat,  or  accustomed  to 
the  cold.  In  a  real  sense  he  does  neither.  The 
Siberian  fossil  elephant  is  wool-covered.  The 
African  elephant  is  hairless.  That  is,  in  each 
case  the  environment  conquered  the  animal  as  far 
as  such  modification.  But  the  Eskima  is  quite 
as  unprotected  from  cold,  as  far  as  his  person  is 
concerned,  as  is  the  African.  In  each  case  the 
man  masters  the  environment.  He  defends  him- 
self from  the  cold,  and  defends  himself  from  the 
heat,  alike  defying  both. 

But  he  is  modified .-'  Yes,  but  how  much } 
Take  him  in  his  highest  development,  and  he  will 
face  the  Arctic  circle  one  year  and  equatorial 
Africa  the  next,  and  you  will  meet  him,  un- 
changed by  either,  the  year  after  in  a  New-York 
drawing-room.  He  has  beaten  the  cold,  and 
beaten  the  heat,  and  remains  unmodified  by 
either,  —  a  prosperous,  civilized  gentleman. 

Start  at  the  Gulf,  and  follow  up  the  great  river 
to  Lake  Itasca.  Grass  and  flower,  plant  and  tree, 
bird  and  insect,  reptile  and  quadruped,  change  as 
you  go.  You  leave  one  form  behind,  and  find 
another.  The  orange  of  New  Orleans  disappears 
for  the  pawpaw  of  Ohio;  and  the  cane-brake  of 
Louisiana   is   changed   for   the    cranberry-swamp 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         47 

of  Wisconsin,  for  the  wild-rice  marsh  of  Minne- 
sota. The  mocking-bird's  song  is  left  in  the 
South,  and  the  loon  screams  on  the  blue  lakes  of 
the  North.  But  while  all  in  sky  and  land  and 
water  has  changed,  one  creature  alone  has  not 
changed.  The  American  man  is  the  same  in 
Louisiana  and  Minnesota,  in  Alabama  and 
Dakota.  He  declines  to  change  with  the  chan- 
ging degrees.  He  knows  no  North  and  no  South. 
The  whole  land  and  the  long  river  are  his  own  : 
he  has  subdued  both. 

It  is  not  man's  effort  to  come  into  harmony  with 
his  environment,  but  to  make  the  environment 
come  into  harmon}^  with  him.  The  farther  he 
develops,  the  less  is  it  the  question  whether  he  fits 
the  environment,  and  the  more  it  is  the  ques- 
tion whether  the  environment  fits  him.  The  ratio 
of  his  progress  is  the  ratio  of  his  indifference  to 
his  environment,  because  it  expresses  the  measure 
of  his  power  to  make  the  environment  what  he 
will. 

The  relation  of  man  to  the  world  in  which  he 
lives  is  that  of  master,  then.  It  may  be  in  abey- 
ance for  years  ;  but  develop  his  powers,  and  that 
is  the  result.  He  sees  no  force  in  nature  that  he 
does  not  undertake  to  understand  and  use.  His 
instinct  is  unerrinjr.     "  I  ought  to  understand  that. 


48  THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

I  ought  to  be  able  to  turn  it  to  account.  I  am  not 
able  to-day.  Some  day  I  shall  be."  Outside  his 
power,  things  are  lawless  and  irrational.  They 
need  to  be  captured,  collared,  and  branded,  and 
made  to  do  the  bidding  of  the  master.  Continent, 
island,  ocean,  all  are  the  same.  They  need  ex- 
ploring, mapping,  investigating,  mastering.  The 
North-west  Passage  has  not  been  found.  But 
while  men  are  men,  the  quest  of  years  will  never 
be  abandoned.  Men  will  not  be  frighted  from  it 
by  the  frozen  shapes  of  the  pilgrims  who  have 
fallen  by  the  way,  nor  by  the  white  death  that 
watches  from  the  ghostly  ice-cliffs.  The  secret  of 
the  pole  will  be  discovered,  and  the  Arctic  circle 
marked  upon  our  charts  some  day  with  no  omis- 
sions of  pale  crag  or  shadowy  headland. 

There  is  a  development,  then,  of  man  u^Don  the 
earth.  And  it  has  an  end.  The  development 
results  in  sovereignty.  Nature,  if  you  call  her  so, 
is  developing  her  master.  It  is  unique  among  de- 
velopments, but  not  irrational.  The  force  called 
will  —  personal  will  —  comes  in  among  the  blind 
forces,  as  a  special  force  from  the  outside  at  last, 
and  asserts  itself,  insisting  upon  its  own  pleasure 
and  its  own  way.  In  the  highest  type  of  man 
there  is  that  sort  of  imperiousness  about  it,  which 
instinctively  attacks  every  other  force  as  hostile, 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         49 

until  it  has  brought  it  to  subjection.  In  fact,  it 
scarce  admits  the  right  of  any  other  force  to  be, 
unless  as  amenable  and  obedient  to  itself. 

The  revealed  idea  of  the  world  is  that  it  is  an 
unfinished  world.  Pronounced  "  good,"  the  world 
is  not  absolute,  but  relative,  good  for  the  purpose 
of  its  Maker.  And  to  be  good  for  that  purpose,  it 
must  be  a  developing  world,  fitted  for  a  developing 
master  and  occupant.  It  is  nowhere  represented 
as  a  satisfactory  and  perfected  thing.  Man  is  its 
Maker's  foreman  for  completing  it,  and  the  first 
command  is  also  a  commission.  Until  it  is 
brought  under  the  control  of  a  personal  reason  and 
will,  it  is  somehow  savage  and  lawless.  With 
capacities  of  beneficence  and  good,  these  capaci- 
ties are  not  developed  and  made  active  to  a 
rational  creature,  but  by  the  control  of  a  rational 
will, 

I  am  not  disturbed  in  this  view  by  the  fact  that 
man  often  misuses  the  world.  It  is  of  the  very 
essence  of  his  condition  as  a  developing  creature, 
that  he  should  make  mistakes,  and  even  do  great 
wrongs ;  trials  which  result  in  nothing,  efforts 
which  do  harm.  He  develops  by  his  blunders  as 
by  his  prudence,  grows  by  his  mistakes  as  by  his 
wisdom.  He  can  only  learn  the  right  way  after 
trying  a  dozen  wrong  ways. 


50    THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

A  complete  and  perfect  world,  all  of  whose 
powers  were  visible,  all  its  laws  plain,  all  its  ways, 
all  its  resources  palpable,  would  be  a  good  world 
possibly  for  some  imaginable  intelligences,  but  not 
a  good  world  for  a  creature  gradually  groping 
upward  and  onward  toward  higher  conditions.  A 
perfect  world  requires,  and  is  only  fit  for,  a  perfect 
occupant. 

Science  has  arrived  at  last  at  the  inspired  con- 
ception of  an  imperfect  world,  —  a  world  which  is 
growing,  developing,  progressing ;  the  outcome  of 
ages  of  toil  and  wrestle,  and  agony,  and  death,  but 
yet  only  the  germ  of  the  world  that  is  yet  to  be. 

But  Science  is  necessarily  dumb  as  to  the 
purpose.  She  only  knows  what  she  sees.  She 
cannot  tell  us  the  beginning  of  this,  nor  the  end. 
Indeed,  she  is  compelled  in  her  unhelped  thinking 
to  say  that  it  has  no  purpose,  no  beginning,  and 
no  ending. 

Yet  such  is  the  quality  of  the  human  intellect, 
that  it  will  not  be  content.  Its  demand  is  for 
reasons  and  meanings,  for  causes  and  purposes. 
Truer  than  science,  as  sometimes  presented,  it 
demands  that  things  shall  be  accounted  for,  that 
they  shall  be  rational,  that  there  shall  be  germs 
to  develop,  and  an  outcome  to  the  development ; 
that  every  thing  means  something,  is  connected 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         5  I 

with  a  series  of  other  things,  is  one  link  in  a  chain 
which  is  endless  ;  insists  on  things  being  reason- 
able, that  is,  and  therefore  reasons  about  them ;  has 
an  innate  compulsion,  driving  it  to  ask,  "  Why  are 
these  things  so  ?  " 

It  would  be  just  intellectual  suicide  to  content 
one's  self  with  labelling  and  tabulating //2^«<?;«^;/«. 
The  meaning  and  the  purpose  of  the  phenomenon 
—  what  does  the  thing  mean  ?  what  is  it  for  ?  — 
is  the  problem  of  men.  The  beast  just  eats  the 
phenomenon,  or  drinks  it,  and  thinks  no  more 
about  it. 

I  think,  in  the  pursuit  of  a  meaning  for  the 
questions  of  the  world  and  man,  the  meaning 
revealed  as  the  historic  faith  has  taught  from  the 
beginning  is  entirely  rational,  and  ignores  or 
distorts  no  fact. 

The  world  is  God's.  It  is  an  incomplete  world, 
a  world  that  yet  needs  ordering  and  reducing  and 
humanizing  ;  a  developing  world,  as  science  would 
phrase  it.  Phrasing  is  of  no  account  :  we  want 
the  fact,  not  the  phrase.  God  is  working  at  it  yet. 
"My  Father  worketh  hitherto,  and  I  work." 

And  such  a  world  is  fitted  for  an  imperfect  being 
who  needs  ordering  and  reducing  himself,  patient 
training,  slow  growing  from  the  deep  descent 
where   the   commission    finds   him,    to   the   lofty 


52  THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

heights  which  are  declared  to  be  his  goal,  —  a 
developing  being,  you  see,  as  science  phrases  it 
again  ;  and  again  I  say  the  phrase  is  nothing,  we 
are  looking  to  the  fact. 

God  gives  the  earth  to  this  creature  of  His, 
because  in  every  condition,  no  matter  how  low- 
fallen,  how  lost  and  degraded,  there  is  that  in  him 
which  broadly  marks  him  from  every  other  crea- 
ture on  the  earth  :  he  is  capable  of  mastering  it. 
He  has  the  seal  of  a  Maker  upon  him,  in  his 
meanest  estate.  He  is  in  a  peculiar  sense  the  son 
of  the  Maker,  and  in  the  image  of  the  Maker.  He 
is  on  his  Father's  ground  to  obey,  to  command,  to 
endure  ;  for  he  has  a  will. 

His  business  is  to  break  the  earth  in  to  obedi- 
ence ;  to  clean  the  foul  things  out,  and  prosper  the 
pure;  to  restrain  the  lawless — and  Jiis  judgment 
shall  decide  what  is  lawless,  with  no  appeal ;  to 
destroy  the  savage,  to  drive  out  the  evil.  It  is  his 
to  say  whether  a  mountain  shall  stand,  or  be  cast 
into  the  sea ;  whether  a  river  shall  flow  at  its  own 
will,  or  be  diked  in  and  driven  to  the  sea  as  he 
wills ;  whether  a  forest  shall  remain,  or  a  corn- 
field shall  stand  in  its  place  ;  whether  the  sands  of 
Suez  shall  drift  at  the  wind's  will,  or  a  river  for 
his  ships  shall  flow  at  human  will  ;  whether  the 
Atlantic  and  the  Pacific  shall  be  walled  apart  as  he 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         53 

finds  them,  or  he  shall  burst  the  dividing  mountain 
barriers  and  make  them  for  his  uses  one. 

Grant  a  Maker  at  all,  and  this  is  all  rational. 
This  being  is  the  son  and  heir,  the  prospective  pro- 
prietor of  the  estate.  The  Maker  fits  it  for  other 
creatures, — that  is  all  reasonable  too, — but  the 
son  is  the  master,  he  must  fit  it  for  himself.  He 
must  be  left,  too,  to  decide  v^hat  other  creatures 
shall  remain  his  tenants.  As  he  does  not  hesitate 
to  uproot  a  mountain,  or  turn  a  river  out  of  its  bed, 
or  clear  half  a  continent  of  its  forests,  so  he  does 
not  hesitate  to  annihilate  ten  million  buffaloes,  and 
extinguish  a  whole  animal  species,  because  he 
needs  the  room  they  occupy.  The  mastership  of 
the  world  he  lives  in  is  a  part  of  his  consciousness. 
He  will  not  hesitate  to-morrow  to  turn  Sahara  into 
an  inland  sea,  if  he  sees  any  good  for  himself  in 
it ;  and  in  doing  it  he  will  be  restrained  by  no  fear 
lest  any  thing  should  go  wrong  in  the  ocean's  tides 
or  the  earth's  rainfall,  and  by  no  dread  lest  he 
should  extinguish  a  whole  race  of  animals  off  the 
face  of  the  earth. 

The  insolence  of  power,  one  says  .-'  But  by  him- 
self he  has  no  power.  As  an  animal  he  would 
perish  in  one  generation.  His  power  rests  in  this, 
that  he  has  mastered  certain  secrets  and  powers 
of   what  we   call   nature,    and    has   turned   them 


54    THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

against  herself.  This  mastery  so  far  is  the  pledge 
of  mastery  further.  He  has  lost,  so  far,  any  dread 
of  her,  has  learned  that  her  strongest  forces  are 
controllable  by  a  will.  And  he  has  a  will.  No 
other  thing  alive  on  earth  has.  And  his  will  is 
imperial,  admits  no  opposition. 

In  the  i^lay  of  force  between  man  and  his  en- 
vironment, both  are  influenced.  So  much  Science 
can  tell  us,  and  has  hardly  ceased  standing  as- 
tounded at  its  own  acuteness  in  observing  so 
plain  and  visible  a  fact. 

But  whereas  the  end  of  the  struggle  with  the 
environment  in  all  other  animals  is  peace  and  con- 
tent, man's  struggle  with  his  environment  never 
ceases.  The  bird  builds  a  nest  to  suit  at  last,  let 
us  say,  after  many  trials  as  some  tell  us  ;  but  when 
the  perfect  fitness  is  reached,  its  descendants  go 
on  building  exactly  the  same  kind  of  nest  for  a 
thousand  years. 

Man  builds  a  palace  at  mighty  labor  and  enor- 
mous cost.  But  no  palace  was  ever  built  on  earth 
which  satisfied  the  builder,  or  which  the  next 
builder  did  not  at  once  propose  to  improve.  This 
is  a  type  of  the  whole  situation.  Man  has  never 
yet  made  nor  found  an  environment  to  suit  him  ; 
and  there  is  not  the  slightest  scientific  indication 
that,  upon  this  earth,  he  ever  will.     There  is  a 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         55 

vast  difference  between  Windsor  Castle  and  the 
royal  palace  of  Dahomey  ;  and  yet  so  far  beyond 
them  both  is  the  possible  ideal  in  a  highly  devel- 
oped intellect  and  imagination,  that  the  difference 
becomes  infinitesimal. 

But  the  clash  of  forces  —  personal  will  against 
material  obstruction — still  trains  the  man,  and 
still  subdues  the  material ;  develops  both,  as  we 
may  say. 

The  end  is  the  making  of  perfect  men,  ac- 
cording to  revelation.  Is  there  any  thing  un- 
scientific in  that  .'*  The  end,  it  seems,  of  all  the 
struggle  for  existence,  survival  of  the  fittest, 
re-action  of  environment,  and  the  rest,  has  been 
in  one  case  a  perfect  tiger,  in  another  a  perfect 
eagle. 

We  admit  their  perfection  after  their  kind.  It 
satisfies  our  conceptions,  our  sense  of  the  fitness  of 
things.  In  its  way  there  can  be  nothing  better. 
The  end  has  come  for  the  striped  monarch  in  the 
jungle,  for  the  red-eyed  monarch  of  the  mountain 
summit,  — 

"  Who  clasps  the  crag  with  crooked  hands, 
Beneath  the  sun,  in  lonely  lands." 

But  man  has  not  attained  perfection.  As  no 
work  of  his  has  ever  yet  satisfied  his  own  ideal, 


$6         THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

SO  no  man  (One  excepted)  has  ever  yet  satisfied 
himself  or  other  men. 

A  case  of  arrested  development  we  can  under- 
stand, and  leave  it  in  its  ugliness  and  ineffective- 
ness. But  here  development  still  goes  on.  Here 
still  is  the  passionate  protest  against  imperfection, 
and  the  determined  effort  to  understand  the  reason 
and  remove  it. 

As  man  protests  against  his  own  imperfection, 
so  he  protests  against  the  world's.  He  is  wrestling 
with  both.  He  never  saw  a  field  tha,t  might  not 
be  fairer,  a  lake  that  might  not  be  a  clearer  azure, 
a  sunset  that  might  not  flame  in  more  magnificence 
of  purple  and  golden  splendor,  nor  a  sunrise  whose 
spires  of  gleaming  fire  might  not  burn  with  a 
greater  glory  of  the  dawn.  He  is  the  world's 
critic,  as  he  is  his  own,  and  pronounces  no  work 
of  either  perfect. 

Who  is  this  daring  being  who  stands  beneath 
the  infinite  blue  of  the  star-sown  spaces,  on  the 
green  graves  where  his  fathers'  bones  are  bleach- 
ing into  dust  again,  child  of  an  hour,  soon  to  lay 
his  own  beside  them,  and  arraigns  himself,  his  race, 
its  sages,  its  heroes  and  its  demigods,  his  fathers 
for  all  the  ages,  as  imperfect,  failures,  abortions 
of  a  splendid  possibility,  rubbishy  attempts  at 
what  man  ought  to  be  in  his  conception  ;  and  who 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         5/ 

arraigns  the  world  he  stands  on  equally,  finds  fault 
with  its  days  and  nights  and  the  procession  of  its 
years,  criticises  its  sunlight  and  its  starlight,  the 
flow  of  its  rivers,  the  roar  of  its  cataracts,  and  the 
sweep  of  its  seas  ?  criticises  all  in 

"  The  vision  and  the  faculty  divine  ;  " 
The  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or  land." 

Is  man  an  exile  ?  That  is  the  declaration  of 
revelation,  and  it  certainly  accounts  for  what  we 
see.  The  vision  of  other  worlds  is  about  him, 
across  his  dreams  comes  the  splendor  that  sleeps 
upon  the  hills  of  Paradise.  He  is  a  prince,  dis- 
crowned and  wandering,  but  a  prince  still,  royal 
though  in  peasant's  guise ;  and  no  wonder  the 
dim  memory  of  the  palaces  and  the  halls  raises  a 
standard  impossible  when  he  would  garnish  the 
hut  of  a  peasant,  or  content  himself  with  the 
beauty  of  the  clodded  glebe.  There  can  be  no 
end  to  his  toil  until  the  world  is  made  again  in 
the  image  of  his  home. 

I  confess  I  can  see  no  rational  way  of  account- 
ing for  this  position  of  man,  except  the  revealed 
way.  There  has  been  no  theory  drawn  from 
natural  knowledge  which  at  all  fills  the  require- 
ment, except  it  be  in  the  conceit  of  the  maker. 
No  generalization  of  imperfections  makes  a  per- 


58    THE  STRUGGLE   FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

feet.  Nothing  that  man  has  known  by  the  senses 
can  have  created  the  ideal  before  which  all  sensa- 
tions are  poor  and  mean  and  pale. 

The  principle  of  heredity  might  give  us  some 
scientific  help.  These  visions,  glimpses,  dreams 
of  a  perfect  world,  are  they  the  faint  memories  of 
ancestral  condition,  as  the  biologists  tell  us  still 
remain  in  creatures  whose  customs  and  habitat 
have  long  since  changed.-'  The  answer  of  reve- 
lation is  plain.  Whatever  one  may  make  of 
Paradise  and  the  Fall,  it  is  clearly  the  story  of 
an  ancestry  in  other  conditions  and  another  envi- 
ronment. At  all  events,  it  is  quite  impossible, 
I  think,  to  get  a  scientific  explanation  of  man's 
peculiar  attitude  in  any  other  way.  And  I  think, 
if  the  turning-about  of  the  domestic  dog  two  or 
three  times  before  he  lies  down  be  the  remains  of 
and  the  evidence  for  the  ancestral  condition, 
when  wild  dogs  turned  thus  to  break  down  the 
grass  for  a  bed,  it  is  not  unscientific  to  hold  that 
man's  peculiar  attitude  toward  the  world,  and  his 
peculiar  manner  of  dealing  with  it,  may  be  a 
reminiscence  of  an  ancestral  condition  when  he 
was  consciously  and  knowingly  in  accord  with  his 
environment,  because  he  was  God's  vicegerent, 
and  everywhere  the  master  in  a  world  that  obeyed 
him. 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         59 

By  the  light  of  revelation  upon  the  case,  he 'is 
struggling  in  no  blind  wrestle.  There  is  a  pur- 
pose ahead,  and  it  is  definite.  Revelation  de- 
clares it  to  be  the  recovery  of  a  lost  estate.  His 
perfection  has  had  its  type  visible  upon  the  earth. 
Perfect  humanity  is  not  a  dream.  A  perfect 
world  is  not  a  dream.  By  the  confession  of  ene- 
mies and  friends  alike,  one  Man  stands  out  from 
the  historic  page  perfect,  flawless.  "  Which  of 
you  convinceth  me  of  sin  1 "  That  challenge 
flashed  out  into  the  face  of  man  has  never  been 
accepted. 

In  Jesus  Christ,  God  sees  His  ideal  of  human 
nature.  Such  it  was  meant  to  be,  such  was  His 
purpose  in  the  making  of  it,  and  such  it  can  be 
again.  Because  it  can  be  such,  God  endures  it. 
Otherwise  one  sees  not  how  it  escapes  being  the 
most  absurd  and  inconsequential  of  all  things  ex- 
isting. There  in  the  Four  Gospels  is  the  story  of 
a  real  Man,  His  words  and  His  acts ;  and  the  rev- 
elation declares  that  such  a  pattern  is  attainable ; 
and  the  whole  purpose  of  the  world,  and  its  devel- 
opment of  man,  and  his  development,  the  end  of 
all  the  centuries  of  stress  and  strain,  of  toil  and 
endeavor,  is  to  bring  man  in  the  individual,  and  in 
the  mass,  nearer  to  that  likeness. 

And  this  Man  must  be  definitely  set  outside  the 


6o  THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

Jaw  of  development,  as  distinct,  exceptional,  and 
unique.  To  say  nothing  else,  the  law  requires 
that  Christianity  be  a  growth  like  all  else,  and 
improve  and  differentiate  in  growing.  But  the 
only  perfect  Christian  was  Jesus  Christ  Himself, 
Eighteen  centuries  of  Christianity  has  brought 
forth  no  Christian  to  be  named  with  the  Founder. 
Its  perfection  is  the  germ  ;  and  all  development 
is  to  get  back  to  the  germ  again.  "I  am  Alpha," 
but  also  "  Omega,"  —  the  First  and  the  Last,  the 
beginning  and  the  ending. 

This  Man,  no  development  Himself,  out  of  the 
ordinary  stream  of  earthly  causation  entirely, 
claims  to  be  the  Son  of  God,  and  therefore,  in 
the  only  utterly  perfect  sense,  the  Son  of  man. 

His  life  is  the  genuine  human  life  ;  His  posi- 
tion, the  genuine  human  position ;  His  attitude 
towards  the  world,  the  perfect  attitude  of  perfect 
men.  It  is  never  to  be  forgotten,  that  the  Chris- 
tian definition  of  humanity  is  Christ  Himself, 
because  He  is  God's  definition. 

Now,  what  was  His  attitude  toward  the  world, 
—  toward  His  environment.-'  He  was  absolute 
Master  and  Lord  of  it ! 

"The  winds  and  the  sea  obey  Him."  "Peace, 
be  still !  "  The  water  is  as  firm  under  His  feet  as 
the  land,     tie  walks  upon  the  sea.     As  the  earth 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE   MASTERY.         6 1 

yields  bread  to  other  men  by  toil,  she  yielded  Him 
food  for  the  five  thousand  at  a  wish.  Leprosy 
vanishes  at  his  word.  Disease  disappears  in  his 
presence.  Th6  blind  see,  and  the  deaf  man 
hears,  and  the  lame  walks.  Death  is  at  His  com- 
mand, and  answers  to  the  Master.  Everywhere 
Nature  and  all  her  forces  are  His  obedient  ser- 
vants. He  is  in  all  places  sovereign.  His  will 
asserts  itself,  and  Nature  obeys.  It  is  a  perfect 
human  will,  and  omnipotent  over  all  things, 
because,  being  a  perfect  human  will,  it  is  one  with 
the  Divine. 

And  on  this  matter  of  the  will,  observe.  He  not 
only  asserts  His  o'wn.  He  appeals  constantly  to 
others  to  assert  theirs.  He  makes  will  the  power 
imperial.  He  demands  faith  for  the  curing,  — 
that  is,  in  the  final  analysis,  the  accord  of  the 
other's  will  with  His  own,  and  the  belief  in  will, 
"  Lord,  if  Thou  wilt,  Thou  canst  make  me 
clean."     "  I  will  !  be  thou  clean." 

It  will  scarcely  meet  the  case  here,  to  deny 
these  things  which  we  call  miracles.  If  the  re- 
vealed theory  be  true,  they  are  simply  normal  and 
natural  to  the  Man  who  is  the  perfect  man.  That 
is,  after  all,  the  conception  of  them  in  the  New 
Testament.  They  are  revelations  of  what  is  pos- 
sible, what  is  even  necessary,  when  men  are  in 
their  true  relations. 


62  THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

These  things  the  sons  of  God  do,  so  the  one 
true  Son  showed  by  doing  them.  This  way  the 
sons  of  God  hve,  so  He  showed  by  living. 
"Greater  works  than  these  shall  ye  do,"  was  His 
own  word. 

That  men  could  have  conceived  such  an  ideal, 
supposing  the  miracles  inventions  of  men,  is  a 
harder  thing  to  explain  than  the  admission  of 
their  truth.  Is  it  possible  to  conceive  where  they 
got  this  idea  of  what  a  perfect  man  ought  to  do 
and  ought  to  say,  and  how  such  an  one  would 
stand  toward  Nature .-'  For,  mark,  it  is  not  merely 
wonder-works  and  strange  manifestations  :  these 
have  been  imagined,  and  may  be  again.  It  is 
the  whole  situation,  —  the  works  and  their  sur- 
roundings, their  moral  character;  and  His  who 
does  them.  They  are  a  part  of  the  whole  concep- 
tion. They  belong  to  the  character;  and  I  hesi- 
tate not  to  assert,  with  thousands  of  thoughtful 
men,  that  for  the  men  of  his  day,  or  indeed  any 
day,  to  have  imagined  and  wrought  out  the  con- 
ception of  Jesus  Christ,  would  have  been  a  won- 
der more  uncxplainable,  more  bewildering,  than 
any  miracle  or  all  the  miracles  recorded  in  Old 
Testament  or  New. 

Observe  here  that  I  am  not  dwelling  upon  the 
moral  so  much  now,  but  rather  upon  the  physical 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY.         6t^ 

side  of  man's  mastery  of  the  world.  That  mas- 
tery has  been  too  often  looked  upon  as  a  mere 
blind  struggle  of  forces  ;  and  in  the  explanations 
given  of  it,  or  the  non-explanations,  from  the 
agnostic  or  material  side,  that  is  all  it  is,  and 
the  end  is  of  no  consequence  in  any  case. 

We  are  told  that  the  time  is  coming  when  the 
poor  earth  shall  be  exhausted  of  all  force,  and 
swing  cold  and  frozen  in  the  blackness  of  icy 
space ;  sun,  moon,  and  stars  all  gone  dead  about 
it.  An  ingenious  gentleman  has  explained  that 
cheerful  theory  as  the  established  "scientific" 
one,  in  a  neat  little  book  which  is  quite  seriously 
intended. 

The  factors  of  a  Maker,  and  a  tenant  in  the 
Maker's  likeness,  —  so  much  so  that  he  is  taught 
to  call  the  Maker  his  Father,  —  the  factors  of 
sense  and  will,  eliminated  out  of  the  whole  affair, 
such  an  end  is  perhaps  natural  enough,  and  at  all 
events  is  just  as  good  an  end  as  a  stupid  affair  of 
the  sort  deserves.  Indeed,  one  wonders  rather 
that  it  has,  being  without  any  sense,  kept  from 
going  to  some  sort  of  smash  so  long. 

It  is  a  relief  to  see,  however,  the  common- 
sense  way  in  which  men  that  are  not  scientific 
go  right  on  beautifying,  bettering,  civilizing  the 
world,  making  their  homes  upon  it,  finding  daily 


64    THE  STRUGGLE   FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

new  riches  in  it,  mastering  it  continually  to 
sweeter,  fairer  uses, — doing  just  what  the  Maker 
told  them  to  do  with  it  from  the  first,  in  simple 
confidence  in  God  and  in  themselves. 

For  the  Christian  faith  gives  us  the  future,  as 
it  does  the  present.  In  the  prayer,  "  Our  Father 
which  art  in  Heaven,"  past,  present,  and  future 
meet  in  one  eternal  Now. 

Duty  where  a  man  is,  the  duty  at  his  feet,  — 
that  is  for  man.  To  aid  the  doing  of  the  duty,  to 
guard  the  doer,  to  bless  the  thing  done,  and  roll 
out  the  future  in  its  order,  —  this  is  God's. 

What  catastrophe  may  be  signified  in  the  awful 
words  of  St.  Peter,  the  Church  has  not  decided, 
and  no  man  knows.  But  that  there  is  among  all 
the  stars  that  roll,  and  all  the  suns  that  shine, 
some  special  grace  and  love  for  the  little  world 
whose  bread  the  Lord  ate,  whose  water  He 
drank,  whose  air  He  breathed,  which  He  baptized 
with  the  sweat-drops  of  Gethsemane  and  the 
blood  and  water  of  Calvary,  is  a  conviction  inevi- 
table to  the  Christian.  Christ,  in  some  sense, 
redeemed  the  earth  itself. 

So  it  is  a  duty,  as  one  of  our  scientists  under- 
takes to  tell  us,  —  leaving  his  "science"  and  turn- 
ing preacher  for  the  time,  —  it  is  our  duty  "to 
make  some  small  spot  upon  the  earth  better  and 


THE  STRUGGLE   FOR    THE  MASTERY.         65 

brighter."  But  for  this  duty  we  Christians  can 
give  a  sanction  :  "  science "  can  give  none,  — 
science,  which  tells  us  that  all  is  upon  its  road 
into  icy  blackness  and  the  perfect  equilibrium  of 
eternal  death. 

It  is  our  duty,  because  the  earth  is  our  Father's, 
and  He  has  given  it  to  the  children  of  men,  His 
children;  because  we  are  His  tenants  upon  it, 
and  responsible ;  because  His  eternal  Son  lived 
our  life  upon  it,  died,  was  buried  upon  it,  and  rose 
from  it ;  because  it  is  a  ransomed  earth,  once 
trodden  by  the  feet  of  God. 

Therefore  it  is  not  mere  caprice,  but  duty,  that 
we  toil  to  civilize  it,  to  make  it  rational,  human, 
healthful,  kindly,  fair,  and  bountiful.  And  we  do 
our  daily  work  under  God's  blessing,  doing  it 
manfully,  dutifully.  He  shall  bring  it  to  a  right, 
reasonable,  and  good  end. 

And  some  day  we  shall  see  that  mortal  life  is 
indeed  a  struggle,  a  sore  wrestle  with  laboring 
lungs  and  throbbing  veins,  and  straining  muscles 
and  aching  brain.  But  it  is  not  a  fight  of  wolves 
or  jackals  for  carrion,  that  the  greediest  and  the 
strongest  may  survive.  It  is  God's  battle,  and 
man's,  a  grand  fight  of  knights  and  brothers  and 
gentlemen,  under  the  eternal  Man  our  Brother 
and    our  King,  shoulder  to    shoulder,  against  all 


G6  THE  STRUGGLE  FOR    THE  MASTERY. 

that  is  foul  and  false  and  base  and  bad,  because 
these  are  our  Father's  enemies  and  the  world's 
enemies  as  they  are  our  own,  and  have  no  busi- 
ness here,  in  the  final  idea,  upon  God's  green 
world,  and  under  the  eyes  and  hands  of  the  chil- 
dren of  God  and  the  soldiers  of  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ. 


LECTURE   111. 
THE  STEP-CHILD  OF  TIME. 


For  I  reckon  that  the  sufferings  of  this  present  time  are  not  xoorthy 
to  he  compared  zaith  the  glory  that  shall  be  revealed  in  its. 

For  the  earnest  expectation  of  the  creation  '  waiteth  for  the  mani- 
festation of  the  sons  of  God.  For  the  creation  -was  made  subject  to 
vanity,  not  zoillingly,  but  by  reason  of  him  zuho  hath  subjected  the 
same  in  hope.  Because  the  creature  itself  also  shall  be  delivered  from 
the  bojidage  of  corruption  into  the  glorious  liberty  of  the  children  of 
God. 

Rom.  viii.  18-21. 
'  Revised  Version. 


LECTURE   III. 
THE  STEP-CHILD  OF  TIME. 

OUR  battle  with  the  material  world,  which 
God  put  us  upon  the  earth  to  fight,  goes 
bravely  on,  these  days,  they  tell  us.  There  is 
loud  boasting,  in  some  quarters,  of  our  success. 
We  have  found  out,  it  is  said,  so  many  secrets,  we 
have  mastered  so  many  resources,  that  we  may 
consider  ourselves  at  last  certain  of  the  victory, 
and  may  even  claim  the  estate  for  our  own,  and 
refuse  to  recognize  the  Landlord ! 

And  this  conceit,  natural  enough  under  the 
circumstances,  has  made  us  arrogant  and  pre- 
sumptuous, as  if  we  possessed  all  knowledge  and 
could  answer  all  doubts,  and  get  on  very  well 
without  a  God  or  a  revelation  of  His  will. 

This  also,  an  intellectual  effervescence  of  the 
time,  is  not  to  be  wondered  at ;  nor,  surely,  should 
we  wonder  that  in  some  quarters  there  should 
be  a  feeling  of  fear  and  distrust,  as  if  faith  were 
endangered    by    material    knowledge,    and    men 

69 


yo  THE  STEr-CIIILD   OF   TIME. 

were  about  to  be  left  lost  children  on  the  shore 
of  an  infinite  black  deep,  from  whence  can  come 
no  answer  to  their  cries  but  the  moan  of  winds 
and  the  sullen  plunging  of  desolate  seas. 

There  are  voices  prompt  to  say  that  this  is  the 
position  into  which  we  are  forced  by  science. 
We  must  be  content  to  consider  ourselves  prod- 
ucts of  the  earth  we  are  mastering,  beginning 
with  it,  ending  with  it,  —  not  sons  of  God  and 
heirs  of  the  infinite,  but  temporary  products  of 
an  hour,  growths  of  the  dust,  to  return  again  to 
the  dust  without  hope. 

Now,  granting  freely  our  increased  knowledge, 
and  being  thankful  therefor,  one  asks,  first  of  all. 
Wherein  has  it  profited  .<*  Are  we  nearer  than 
were  our  fathers  to  reading  the  riddle  of  exist- 
ence .-*  Have  we  solved  a  single  one  of  the  origi- 
nal questions  that  are  vital  to  humanity  .'*  Have 
we  made  life  one  whit  more  worth  the  living  .-* 

We  have  made  some  beginnings  toward  the 
great  triumph  of  reason  and  will  over  the  brutal 
stupidity  of  things  without  mind.  Let  the  boast- 
ers, for  the  present,  make  the  most  of  our  small 
attainments.  To  mc  they  are  mainly  valuable  as 
an  earnest  of  the  vaster  knowledge  coming,  and 
the  vaster  power.  But  is  human  life  happier  ? 
Have  men  become  more  content  ? 


THE  STEP-CHILD    OF   TIME.  "J I 

Because  we  travel  by  rail  and  not  by  stage- 
coach, have  our  messages  sent  by  electricity  and 
not  on  horseback,  our  clothes  stitched  by  machines 
and  not  by  hand,  oleomargarine  on  our  breakfast- 
tables  instead  of  butter,  and  instead  of  sugar 
glucose,  are  we  so  much  wiser  and  better  than 
our  fathers  ? 

How  many  Chicagos  are  the  equivalent  of  one 
Athens  ?  How  many  millionnaire  manufacturers 
of  lard  from  cotton-seed  go  to  the  making  of  one 
Plato  ?  How  many  glucose-factories  equal  one 
Parthenon  ?  Would  you  swap  "  Macbeth  "  or 
"  King  Lear "  for  the  longest  railroad  in  the 
United  States  ?  or  "  Paradise  Lost "  for  all  the 
pork  ever  packed,  or  all  the  lard  ever  adulterated  ? 

George  Washington  never  rode  on  a  railroad,  nor 
sent  a  message  by  telegraph,  and  sewing-machines 
and  lucifer  matches  were  alike  unknown  at  Mount 
Vernon.  It  does  not  occur  to  any  one  that  we 
have  much  improved  upon  him  in  the  way  of 
Presidents  of  the  United  States  ! 

It  is  not  knowledge,  nor  the  advantages  won 
from  Nature,  that  much  affect  man  in  what  makes 
him  man.  His  life,  the  heart  and  reality  of  him, 
are  inside,  and  distinct  from  his  circumstances. 
The  things  nearest  him,  the  essentials  of  his  posi- 
tion, his  character,  and  his  hope,  arc  never  touched 


72  THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME, 

by  any  power  or  any  knowledge  won  from  matter. 
The  primal  questions  of  humanity  are  here  yet, 
and  before  them  science  is  dumb. 

It  is  idle  to  tell  us  they  are  insoluble,  that  our 
time  is  wasted  in  the  asking;  for  men  will  just 
keep  on  asking  them  in  the  teeth  of  all  "  science." 
They  will  not  down  at  any  man's  bidding.  There 
is  nothing  to  charm  them  into  silence  in  any 
knowledge  of  matter  and  its  ways. 

Pain,  sorrow,  heart-break,  the  pit  dug  across 
every  man's  road,  the  skeleton  that  keeps  the 
keys,  right,  wrong,  sin  and  its  penalties,  the  dim 
hereafter  in  which  all  men  instinctively  believe, 
—  these  things  are  with  us,  and  these  things  will 
stay. 

They  are  as  real  as  the  Alps.  They  belong  to 
ignorant  people  and  wise  people,  to  the  savage 
and  the  civilized.  They  are  persistent  facts  of 
human  nature. 

A  genuine  science  dare  not  ignore  them.  It 
must  find  a  place  for  them  in  any  theory,  — 
must  at  least  try\.o  account  for  their  being,  though 
utterly  helpless  to  explain  them. 

For  there  is  but  one  thing  unchangeable  on  the 
earth,  as  far  as  we  know,  —  the  human  soul.  All 
else  is  phenomenon.  The  waters  wear  away  the 
stones,  the  mountains  crumble  downward  to  the 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME.  y^ 

plain,  the  rocks  decay  and  fall ;  but  the  soul  of 
man  changes  not.  Across  six  thousand  years  he 
tells  us  the  same  story  when  he  has  had  voice 
at  all. 

And  his  profoundest  utterance  has  never  been 
for  food  or  drink,  for  clothes  or  shelter.  His  cry 
to  the  stars  above  him  and  the  abysses  below, 
across  the  wastes  of  an  empty  land  and  over  the 
sullen  moaning  of  far-plunging  seas,  has  been  to 
the  invisible,  the  unknowable,  the  awful  powers 
that  lie  above  him  and  beneath  him.  "  How  am 
I  connected  with  them  ?  for  I  am  connected.  It 
is  idle  to  talk  to  me  of  the  things  about  me  as  if 
they  were  all ;  for  they  are  not  mine,  nor  am  I  of 
their  family.  I  can  walk  no  road  that  does  not 
lead  me  at  least  to  the  awfulness  of  the  un- 
known, and  that  unknown  holds  the  things  that 
I  must  meet  and  deal  with." 

Why,  the  very  men  that  tell  us  there  is  no 
sense  in  wasting  our  time  on  things  invisible,  for 
we  can  know  nothing  about  them,  are  driven 
themselves,  out  of  all  experience,  out  of  all  knowl- 
edge, out  of  all  fact  of  the  senses,  to  found  their 
whole  present  theory  of  the  universe  upon  an 
invisible  and  unknowable  atom, — a  pure  concep- 
tion of  the  human  intellect. 

Look  upon  man's  position  upon  the  earth  among 


74  THE  STEr-CTHLD    OF   TIME. 

all  living  things,  and  consider.  He  is  the  step- 
child of  Nature. 

She  cares  for  every  thing  else  that  lives.  She 
declines  to  care  for  man.  She  spreads  a  table 
for  the  tiger  in  the  jungle,  for  the  buffalo  on 
the  prairie,  for  the  dragon-fiy  above  the  summer 
brook.  She  clothes  the  crawling  worm,  and  the 
painted  butterfly,  alike  the  white  monster  of  the 
northern  seas,  and  the  jewelled  bird  in  southern 
forests. 

Food,  covering,  shelter,  are  provided  for  beast 
and  insect,  for  fowl  of  the  air,  and  fish  of  the  sea. 
Man  is  turned  out  helpless  and  bare,  to  scorch  or 
freeze,  to  be  lashed  by  the  rain,  pelted  by  the 
hail,  burned  by  the  pitiless  sun.  Material  Nature 
faces  him  as  a  foe.  He  lives  by  fighting  her. 
He  scars  her  face  with  his  furrows  to  make  her 
yield  him  bread  ;  he  tears  open  her  bowels  to  find 
the  tools  to  master  her,  the  warmth  for  his  hearth 
and  the  power  for  his  engines  ;  he  ransacks  her 
hills  and  fells  her  forests  to  build  his  home ;  he 
drains  her  marshes,  dikes  out  her  seas,  walls  in 
her  rivers,  to  make  his  dwelling  with  her  possible. 

And  everywhere  she  resists,  and  turns  a  cold, 
mocking,  cruel  face  upon  him,  till  he  conquers  her. 
Every  new  land  he  settles  fights  him  with  strange 
diseases,    kills    him    with    strange    deaths.       His 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME.  75 

march  is  over  the  graves  of  a  fallen  vanguard. 
Malaria  stands  guard  at  all  the  gates  of  the 
gardens  of  the  Hesperides,  and  claims  the  fore- 
most. "Thorns  also  and  thistles  shall  the  earth 
bring  forth  to  thee."  It  is  the  law  of  the  case 
for  man.  He  holds  his  place  by  the  strong  hand. 
The  crown  of  his  empire  over  the  material  is  a 
crown  of  thorns,  and  his  sceptre  is  a  hammer  of 
iron.  All  tribute  is  wrested  by  sheer  force  of 
blows,  by  ringing  hammer  and  shattering  sledge. 

And  the  higher  he  rises,  the  more  he  becomes 
manlike,  the  more  bitter  is  the  toil,  the  fiercer  the 
struggle.  Where  Nature  is  kindest  to  him,  the 
beast  attains  his  perfection.  Where  Nature  is 
kindest  to  man,  man  sinks  the  lowest.  She  is  in 
her  caresses  a  Delilah  to  the  Samson  her  lord. 
She  shears  his  locks,  and  gives  him  over  to  the 
Philistines,  to  grind  in  their  mill,  —  blind. 

But  marked  as  this  difference  is  between  man 
and  the  animal  in  their  relation  to  this  world,  it  is 
not  the  only  difference,  nor  tjie  greatest. 

Nature  comes  into  accord  with  all  other  living 
things.  She  remains  at  discord  with  man.  Bird, 
beast,  and  insect  lie  close  and  lovingly  in  the  arms 
of  the  great  mother.  They  are  happy.  The  joy 
of  the  bird  on  the  bough,  of  the  deer  on  the 
prairie,  of   the  fish  leaping  through   the  flashing 


'jG  THE  STEP-CHILD    OF   TIME. 

foam, — the  joy  of  mere  living,  —  fills  earth  and  sky 
and  sea.  Who  has  heard  the  mocking-bird  in  a 
moonlit  night  in  Mississippi,  and  has  not  had  born 
in  him  the  sudden  revelation  of  the  bird's  joy  in 
mere  living?  Acres  of  air  quiver  with  the  ecstasy 
of  his  notes.  The  little  creature  shivers,  one  is 
conscious,  in  every  fibre  with  the  gladness  of  its 
own  song.  Its  song  and  itself  are  a  part  of  the 
rich  harmony  of  the  summer  night,  like  the  flood- 
ing moonlight,  the  snowy  drifts  of  the  magnolia- 
blooms,  and  the  musky  perfume  of  the  jessamine. 

But  summer  moonlight,  bird's  song,  perfume 
and  shimmer  of  lovely  half-tropic  woodlands  — 
Ah !  yonder  rises  the  roof  built  by  him  who  owns 
the  forest  and  the  green  slopes  of  flowery  mead- 
ows ;  and  beneath  its  shelter  human  hearts  are 
breaking,  and  human  souls  crying  out  into  the 
night.  Sorrow,  bitter  agony,  wringing  of  empty 
hands,  appeals  to  the  dumb  sky,  from  the  nest 
the  lord  of  all  this  beauty  has  built  to  shelter  the 
treasures  of  his  life. 

And  Nature  sheds  no  tear  for  the  anguish  of 
the  man.  She  is  deaf  and  blind  to  the  broken 
cries  of  the  one  creature  whom  she  docs  not 
understand.  She  weeps  her  night  dews  in  bless- 
ing on  humble  grass-blade  and  towering  oak 
bough.     She  drops  no  balm  into  the  parched  and 


THE  STEP-CHILD    OF  TIME.  J  "J 

tortured  soul  of  man,  bending  over  the  coffin  of 
his  first-born. 

There  is  a  blind  wrestling  in  human  nature  with 
its  environment.  Its  struggle  is  not  merely  a 
struggle  for  existence,  but  a  struggle  to  be 
happy  in  that  existence ;  in  which  struggle  it 
fails,  and  fails  in  precise  proportion  to  its  culti- 
vation and  its  development,  to  the  perfection  of 
its  manhood. 

It  cannot  wring  happiness  out  of  its  surround- 
ings. The  attempt  to  do  so  is  an  instinct  of  the 
animal  nature,  which  experience  and  reason  de- 
clare vain. 

Put  an  ox  in  a  fat  pasture  beside  a  clear  stream, 
and  the  ox  is  as  happy  as  an  ox  can  be.  The 
hungry  tiger,  with  smoking  jaws  tearing  the 
slaughtered  buffalo,  is  happy  to  the  utmost  limit 
of  tiger-nature.  But  it  is  a  commonplace  of 
human  experience,  that  a  man  in  a  palace  is  no 
happier  than  a  man  in  a  hut.  Neither  at  the 
banquets  of  Lucullus,  nor  in  the  Golden  House 
of  Nero,  does  man  find  content.  No  people  ever 
gathered  the  spoils  of  the  world  to  such  degree, 
none  had  its  resources  of  luxury,  art,  beauty,  and 
refinement  at  such  command,  none  rode  upon  the 
heights  of  time  in  guise  so  sublime,  none  were 
lords    so    irresponsible    over  the    world    and    its 


78  THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME. 

resources,  as  the  Roman  patricians  of   the  later 
republic  and  the  earlier  empire. 

Mr.  Arnold  has  painted,  with  a  few  strong 
strokes,  the  despair  and  disgust  of  the  masters  of 
the  world. 

"  In  his  cool  hall,  with  haggard  eyes, 
The  Roman  noble  lay ; 
Then  rose  and  drove,  in  furious  wise, 
Along  the  Appian  Way. 

He  made  a  feast,  drank  fierce  and  fast, 
And  crowned  his  head  with  flowers; 

No  easier  and  no  swifter  passed 
The  impracticable  hours." 

One's  thought  comes  to  our  own  time,  where 
there  is  a  wiser  and  a  better  grasp  of  the  place 
of  lordship  and  command,  and  goes  over  sea  to- 
night, where  the  heir  of  an  empire  lies  dying,  and 
where  with  darkened  heart  the  daughter  of  a  hun- 
dred kings  has  been  for  weary  months  waiting  the 
messenger  whom  no  armed  guards  can  challenge 
and  no  palace-gates  shut  out,  to  summon  the 
light  of  her  life,  the  husband  of  her  youth,  from 
her  love  and  a  great  people's,  and  to  drape  her 
soul  in  the  mantle  of  a  lifelong  sorrow,  and  put 
out  the  lights  in  imperial  halls,  and  quench  the 
house-fires  in  palaces. 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME.  79 

Nay,  there  is  a  hunger  in  the  heart  of  man 
which  refuses  to  be  satisfied.  We  advise  content, 
but  man  declines  contentment.  Never  satisfied 
with  getting,  never  pleased  with  to-day,  this 
strange  denizen  of  the  world  is  driven  on,  rest- 
less, impatient,  protesting,  under  a  divine  dis- 
content which  refuses  to  be  satisfied. 

The  moralists  tell  him  he  ought  to  be  content. 
The  preachers  preach  that  he  ought  to  be  con- 
tent. Some  of  us  think,  if  we  were  in  other 
men's  places  we  would  be  content,  and  wonder 
that  these  others  are  not. 

But  why  quarrel  with  a  fact  of  life .''  Why  not 
take  the  fact,  rather,  and  see  its  meaning .'  For, 
like  every  fact,  it  has  a  meaning,  if  we  can  find  it. 

Why  blame  a  man  for  not  being  content  with  a 
million  .-*  It  is  enough,  you  say.  Yes,  but  enough 
for  zvhat?  If  a  man  has  found  how  to  make  a 
million  honestly,  why  should  he  not  use  his  knowl- 
edge, and  go  on  and  make  another  million  .-•  What 
compulsion  upon  him  to  be  satisfied  with  a  million, 
any  more  than  with  one  hundred  thousand  or  ten 
thousand  .-•  If  it  be  that  he  has  enough  to  live 
upon,  the  answer  is  plain.  To  many  a  man,  ten 
thousand  or  even  five  thousand  would  be  sufficient, 
as  he  would  use  it  to  supply  all  his  wants. 

But  it  is  not  a  question  of  supplying  wants.     It 


80  THE  STEP-CHILD   OF   TIME. 

is  a  question  of  the  human  constitution.  No  man 
ever  yet  was  satisfied  with  getting.  Give  him 
the  United  States  for  an  estate,  and  he  would 
want  Alaska  for  a  summer  residence.  Give  him 
the  whole  earth,  and  he  would  want  the  moon  for 
an  ice-house.  He  is  never  content  with  getting 
money,  or  what  money  represents.  He  is  equally 
never  content  with  getting  power,  fame,  or  knowl- 
edge. He  is  insatiable.  Why  quarrel  with  him  } 
Why  preach  threadbare  moralities  at  him  }  Every 
acquisition  is  but  the  vantage  for  a  new  one  in 
wealth,  honor,  or  knowledge ;  and  every  success  in 
any  only  reveals  the  vastness  which  still  remains 
unwon.  The  richest  man  living  has  gathered  but 
a  poor  fragment  of  the  earth's  possible  wealth  ; 
the  wisest  man,  a  poor  lichen  or  pebble  of  its 
possible  wisdom  ;  and  the  most  famous  man,  but  a 
whisper  of  its  fame.  Each  sees,  as  others  do  not 
see,  some  vision  of  the  dim  realms  unwon. 

A  wise  man,  many  centuries  ago,  who  had  at- 
tained in  largest  measure  all  that  men  desire,  who 
had  tried  in  all  ways  known  to  men  to  reach  con- 
tent and  happiness  on  the  earth,  and  who  wrote 

"  Maratorr;;  fiaTaLOT-qTwv —  irdvTa  ju,arator»/?,"  as  the  SUm 

of  all,  over  crown  and  palace  and  human  knowl- 
edge and  human  fame,  —  gave  his  solution  :  "God 
hath  set  eternity  (the  world)  in  their  heart." 


THE  STEP-CHILD    OF   TIME.  8 1 

For  here  is  this  strange  fact,  that  a  creature, 
to  the  outward  view  and  by  the  outward  theory 
a  product  of  the  world  Uke  all  the  rest,  should  live 
his  life  in  a  perpetual  conflict  with  the  forces 
which  produced  him,  and  in  a  perpetual  protest 
against  the  world  and  its  gifts. 

The  point  I  emphasize  is  not  that  he  struggles 
merely.  It  may  be  said,  all  other  animals  do 
that  in  a  way,  —  the  struggle  of  existence,  they 
call  it.  But  the  peculiarity  in  the  human  case 
is,  that  Nature  never  gives  him  success  in  his 
struggle.  He  is  always  winning,  but  always 
defeated. 

He  blasts  his  way  into  the  earth's  treasure- 
stores.  He  drags  them  forth,  and  is  not  content. 
He  sounds  her  deepest  seas,  and  brings  their 
drowned  riches  to  adorn  his  crown,  and  is  not 
content.  He  masters  her  powers,  fetters  her 
lightning,  chains  her  stored  sunlight  to  his  car. 
He  finds  the  hiding-places  of  her  strength,  and 
makes  it  his  own,  and  fights  Nature  with  her  own 
arms.  He  builds  to  defy  her  tempests.  He 
mocks,  in  his  chambers  of  comfort,  at  her  bitterest 
cold.  He  drives  his  ship  into  the  teeth  of  her 
hurricanes,  sweeps  the  whirlpools  of  her  roaring 
seas,  and  carries  the  harvest  of  his  victories  to 
every  haven.     He  lords  it  over  matter  now  right 


82  THE  STEP-CHILD    OF   TIME. 

royally,  and  with  a  sceptre  which  gives  pledge 
over  vaster  fields. 

And  the  point  is,  that  all  these  victories  are 
barren,  as  far  as  his  earthly  life  goes.  His  rela- 
tion to  Nature  is  one  utterly  alone.  He  protests 
that  all  is  fruitless,  though  he  rises  for  the  fight 
to-morrow.  He  is  led  by  illusions,  and  toils  for 
phantoms.  For  all  past  success  has  not  made 
human  life  one  whit  more  in  accord  or  content 
with  its  environment.  It  is  all  vanity  and  vexa- 
tion still,  and  we  can  give  no  promise  that  it 
ever  will  be  otherwise.  The  entire  discovery  of 
Nature's  secrets,  the  entire  mastery  of  her  powers, 
would  leave,  we  are  bound  to  believe  from  all 
experience  and  deduction,  man  just  as  restless,  as 
full  of  sorrow  and  of  care,  as  ever. 

We  are  compelled  by  reason  and  common-sense 
to  find  a  place  in  any  theory  of  life  for  this  fact. 

We  find  it  in  this,  as  it  seems  to  me :  that  man 
is  under  process  of  development ;  that,  such  pro- 
cess being  temporary,  it  is  impossible  it  should 
ever  bring  content  ;  that  while  the  perfection  of 
every  other  living  creature  after  its  kind  may  be 
reached  by  its  development  upon  this  earth,  man 
does  not  reach  his,  is  not  meant  to  reach  it,  and 
is  forever  driven  onwards  by  necessity,  or  lured 
onwards  by  illusions,  until  when  the  earthly  end 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME.  Z^ 

comes  he  is  still  unsatisfied  and  incomplete. 
And  we  are  driven,  as  it  were,  by  our  innate 
sense  of  the  fitness  of  things,  to  declare  that  this 
temporary  discipline  is  only  a  preparation  for  a 
development  to  come. 

His  development  in  that  which  makes  his  per- 
fection as  a  man  is  not  physical.  Strength,  swift- 
ness, mere  physical  power  in  any  direction,  is  not 
advance  for  man.  At  some  loss  of  these  he  wins 
his  road.  His  heroes  are  not  physical  giants, 
his  world-conquerors  and  kings  of  men  have  not 
been  marked  for  animal  power.  It  is  down 
among  the  savages  that  we  find  leaders  chosen  for 
their  power  of  arm.  The  higher  man  rises,  the 
more  victorious  he  becomes  as  man,  the  less  mere 
thews  and  sinews  count, — the  more  will  stead- 
fastness, moral  courage,  high  sense  of  rectitude 
and  honor,  count.  The  perfection  of  his  breeding 
lies  on  no  parallel  line  with  that  of  ox-breeding  or 
swine-breeding. 

His  development  is  not  upon  physical  lines  at 
all.  And  he  closes  his  life  with  a  development 
incomplete,  and  which  the  environment  about  him 
so  far  is  quite  incapable  of  helping  farther. 

For  the  ideal  of  a  perfect  horse,  which  we  hold 
in  thought,  there  are  all  the  elements  of  realization 
complete  in  this  world.     The  means  are  all  here. 


84  THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME. 

For  the  development  of  a  perfect  man,  the 
means  are  just  as  evidently  not  here.  No  man 
ever  yet  lived,  save  One,  who  other  men  do  not 
plainly  see  was  poorly  developed  and  incomplete, 
measured  by  our  ideal ;  wanting  in  intellect,  and 
wanting  in  moral  power,  —  the  development  spe- 
cial and  peculiar  to  man. 

What  can  we  say,  save  that  the  development 
is  only  begun  here .''  This  unique  being,  pro- 
testing and  warring  at  every  step  with  his  envi- 
ronment, is  led  on  step  by  step  by  the  promises  of 
a  morrow  which  never  comes,  —  is  driven  on  step 
by  step,  by  a  relentless  destiny,  to  the  end. 

The  fable  of  the  Wandering  Jew  is  a  parable  of 
human  life.  Still  incomplete,  and  knowing  him- 
self incomplete,  only  the  beginning  of  what  he 
might  be,  — the  germ  only  of  a  possible  manhood, 
—  he  comes  to  the  door  that  opens -out  into  the 
dark.  He  comes  under  protest.  In  every  age 
and  in  every  condition,  he  makes  that  protest. 
He  is  conscious  that  he  is  incomplete ;  his  yearn- 
ing for  immortality,  which  some  explain  as  only 
an  egoistic  conceit,  is  the  declaration  of  his  sense 
of  incompleteness,  —  the  common  prophecy,  in 
every  germ,  of  its  future. 

Shall  we  stop  with  the  grave  and  the  burial,  — 
"dust  to  dust,"  and  so  the  end  .^     It  is  dust    to 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME.  85 

dust,  and  ashes  to  ashes.  The  Church  of  God  has 
chanted  the  words  over  every  coffin.  So  far,  she 
and  agnostic  science  sing  the  same  anthem.  The 
accord  is  perfect.  But  Science  turns  dumb  in 
this  crisis,  as  she  does  in  so  many  others. 

While  the  tears  fall,  and  the  sobs  relieve  the 
burdened  hearts  around  the  grave,  and  the  clods 
drop  on  the  coffin,  she  might  suggest  the  advan- 
tages of  cremation,  and  so  cheer  the  mourners ; 
but  I  am  not  aware  of  .any  thing  else  she  could 
say,  or  any  thing  else  she  pretends  to  say. 

She  has  been  dealing  with  an  animal,  in  her 
blind  persistency  against  facts  which  have  chal- 
lenged her  at  every  turn.  She  has  gotten  her 
animal  buried ;  and  there  is  positively  nothing 
more  for  her  to  say,  except  to  stare  round  upon 
the  mourners  with  her  big  owl-eyes,  and  deliver 
a  lecture  on  the  best  way  to  dispose  of  the  re- 
mains !  Exceedingly  comforting  to  the  mourners, 
you  say .''  Well,  you  see.  Science  takes  no  account 
of  mourners.  That  these  hearts  are  breaking, 
and  these  souls  are  clothed  in  darkness  for  all 
their  days  on  earth,  is  not  within  the  scope  of 
"  Science."  It  is  her  business  to  find  out  the 
number  of  inches  an  Alpine  glacier  moves  in  a 
year,  exactly,  or  the  number  of  vibrations  a  mole- 
cule of    protoplasm   makes  each    minute   in    the 


86  THE  STEP-CHILD    OF  TIME. 

spike  of  a  nettle  !  Those  tremendous  facts,  and 
not  human  grief  nor  human  heart-break,  are  tlie 
important  things  for  the  study  of  mankind ! 

For,  poor  thing,  she  is  very  cowardly,  very 
easily  scared. 

What  has  become  of  the  man  ?  The  dust  is  not 
the  man.  The  ashes  are  not  the  man.  We  bury 
these,  or  burn  these,  or  sink  them  in  the  sea. 
What  matter .''  But  where  is  the  maji  gone,  — 
the  brother,  the  father,  the  son,  the  husband } 
Where  is  the  intellect,  the  force  of  thought,  the 
will  to  master,  the  rapid  vision  to  see,  the  clear 
reason  to  announce,  the  judgment  to  guide  and 
control,  the  truth,  the  love,  the  tenderness,  the 
whole  power  that  made  the  man  we  knew  and 
loved  and  mourn  ^ 

Why  cannot  even  Science  venture  on  the  road 
of  common-sense  so  far  as  to  say,  according  to 
her  own  doctrine,  "  These  have  not  perished.  No 
force  is  destructible.  In  some  form  it  always  is. 
That  force  you  knew  and  loved,  which  blessed 
and  upheld  and  enlightened,  is  not  dead, — can- 
not be  dead.  Somewhere,  somehow,  I  cannot 
tell  you  where  nor  how,  it  lives,  and  must  live 
forever." 

But  we  who  stand  about  the  sodded  grave  hear, 
from    the    deeps    beyond    the    stars,  a   voice  fall 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF   TIME.  ^y 

through  the  silence  :  "  I  am  the  Resurrection  and 
the  Life." 

And  we  say  to  scared  Science,  "  We  are  not 
afraid,  in  this  extremity,  to  declare  our  faith  in 
your  own  doctrine,  to  which  revelation  gives  cohe- 
rence and  a  purpose." 

The  man  I  loved,  whose  body  lies  under  this 
red  mound,  was,  I  know,  and  he  knew,  but  the 
poor  beginnings  of  his  possibilities.  Strong  brain, 
true  vision,  kind  heart,  —  he  was  a.11  that,  and  to 
me  far  more.  God-loving  and  man-loving,  he  did 
a  brave  day's  work  here,  and  helped  his  fellows 
well. 

But  he  had  only  started.  None  knew  it  better 
than  he.  And  is  this  the  end }  These  green 
leaves  from  the  sprouted  acorn  !  Is  the  acorn 
developed  ?  Yes,  I  should  say  so,  had  I  never 
seen  an  oak.  Having  seen  an  oak,  I  know  better. 
Having  read  the  Gospels,  I  know  the  man  I 
mourn  has  only  begun  to  grow. 

The  human  mind  is  incapable  of  imagining  a 
more  grotesque  absurdity  than  this  grave,  if  this 
grave  holds  my  friend.  The  universe  turns  in 
Titanic  laughter,  and  jeers  and  mocks  with  all 
its  infinite  voices,  at  the  comedy  of  human  life, 
and  the  farce  of  human  pain  and  human  death. 

If  there  be  reason  in  the  universe  at  all,  —  and  I 


88  THE  STEP-CHILD    OF   TIME. 

take  it  that  the  reason  in  man  will  always  compel 
him  to  believe  in  a  reason  in  the  universe,  —  then 
one  is  driven  to  admit  that  the  ultimate  develop- 
ment of  human  nature  must  be  looked  for  out- 
side this  world,  and  beyond  this  life. 

There  is  no  escape  in  reason,  I  dare  to  say, 
from  the  conclusion.  There  is  no  escape  in 
science.  The  law,  let  us  admit,  is  the  law  of 
development.  Here  is  one  creature,  found  upon 
the  earth,  and,  we  admit,  developing  upon  it. 
The  higher  he  grows,  the  more  completely  he 
develops,  the  less  does  he  find  his  environment 
helps  him.  The  more  his  disgust  increases,  the 
more  his  contempt  for  its  pleasures  or  its  pains, 
the  more  his  conviction  that  the  one  and  the 
other  are  folly  to  his  reason,  and  abject  to  his 
demands. 

So  day  by  day  he  plods  a  weary  road,  to  which 
there  is  no  ending.  As  he  grows  more  and  more 
into  manhood,  and  leaves  the  beast  and  the 
beast's  wants  more  behind  him,  as  he  becomes 
more  and  more  master  and  lord,  —  so  more  and 
more  does  his  discontent,  his  contempt,  and  his 
hunger  grow. 

It  is  not  Christian  experience  only  :  it  is  Stoic 
experience,  Buddhist  experience,  all  experience 
where  the  human  asserts  itself,  where  that  which 


THE  STEP-CIl/LD    OF  TIME.  89 

differentiates  man  from  the  beast  is  strongest  and 
clearest.  In  the  highest  types  it  rises,  and  some- 
times asserts  itself  in  very  strange  fashion,  in 
contempt  for  the  environment,  for  the  world  and 
all  it  holds,  and  all  it  can  give  or  refuse.  Satiated 
with  its  pleasures,  its  honors,  its  wealth,  its 
power,  the  man  asserts  his  manhood  by  proclaim- 
ing all  sometimes  a  fraud,  or  a  folly,  and  asking 
from  the  heights  of  power,  of  knowledge,  or  of 
enjoyment,  "  Is  life  worth  living  .-'  " 

And  the  rational  answer  is,  "No."  If  this  be 
ail,  life  is  a  grotesque  absurdity. 

The  only  conclusion  which  can  give  coherency 
to  the  riddle  is  that  man  on  earth,  developed  to 
his  highest,  is  but  a  germ  of  what  man  is  to  be- 
come in  other  conditions.  Hungry-hearted,  sore 
burdened,  weary  and  worn,  he  is  driven  step  by 
step  through  life  to  its  ending. 

The  simulacrum  of  him,  the  organic  construc- 
tion which  gave  him  connection  and  partnership 
with  the  material  life,  dissolves. 

But  the  dead  man  of  this  life,  as  St.  Paul  said 
long  ago,  is  the  planted  seed  of  another  man,  to 
develop  in  another  life.  So  far  the  earth  has 
done  for  him,  and  stops.  As  far  as  he  is  con- 
cerned, its  powers  are  ended.  She  passes  the 
germ  over  into  new  conditions,  —  into  the  land  of 


90  THE  STEP-CHTLD   OF   TTME. 

eternal  realities  and  the  environment  of  the 
infinites. 

Driven  to  the  door,  protesting,  sick,  weary, 
beaten,  though  victor,  he  waits  the  opening  of 
the  awful  valves,  and  passes  through  into  the 
dimness,  —  dimness  to  faith  even,  folded  curtains 
of  darkness  to  science. 

But  in  every  land,  among  every  people,  he 
passes  with  the  human  instinct  of  another  life. 

Shall  we  say  he  alone  of  all  creatures  shall 
come  to  no  issue  .-'  have  no  completeness  .■'  never 
reach  the  vision  of  himself  ?  never  be  what  every 
thrill  of  brain  and  nerve  has  suggested  he  might 
be?  Shall  he  be  the  one  gigantic  joke  of  all  the 
world,  — the  non-scqiiitur  of  the  universe  } 

Revelation  flames  its  torch  across  the  darkness, 
where  human  knowledge  leaves  us,  but  makes  no 
contradiction  in  that  knowledge,  and  reveals 
nothing  which  that  knowledge  can  call  inconse- 
quential or  irrational. 

"This  man  that  has  passed,"  it  cries,  "beyond 
your  ken,  but  not  beyond  mine,  lives.  He  has 
grown  so  far,  in  the  world  down  here.  He  has  not 
been  lost  in  the  passage  where  you  saw  him  not. 
Centre  of  life  and  power,  by  the  endowment 
of  the  Maker,  he  has  entered  upon  a  new  develop- 
ment  under   a   new    environment.       His    infinite 


THE  STEP-CHILD   OF  TIME.  9 1 

longings  are  satisfied  now  with  tlie  infinite.  His 
restlessness  finds  rest  in  eternal  endeavor ;  his 
energies,  in  eternal  work  ;  his  satisfaction,  never 
granted  him  here,  in  eternal  success  in  the  work. 

"  There  he  will  become  a  very  man,  and  the 
delusive  vision  of  his  earthly  years  will  be  ful- 
filled. To  what  heights  or  depths  he  will  attain, 
you  cannot  tell,  nor  can  I ;  but  being  one  of  the 
Lord's  servants,  he  will  become  a  genuine  man, 
and  more  and  more  the  likeness  of  the  Man  who 
is  also  God.  There  is  endless  advance,  and  pure 
joy  in  the  advance  forevermore,  rest  in  ceaseless 
work,  content  in  ceaseless  endeavor.  *We  know 
not  what  he  shall  be '  at  any  point ;  but  always 
we  know  he  will  be  a  man,  and  always  more  and 
more  a  man  forever." 

The  light  that  falls  on  the  graves  where  we  lay 
the  dear  dust  of  our  dead  pales  not  before  the 
lamp  of  human  science.  It  flames  and  flashes  on 
the  marble  of  every  tomb,  from  the  open  sepul- 
chre in  the  garden  of  the  man  of  Arimathasa. 

We  make  no  apology  for  its  existence.  While 
we  look  with  tear-dimmed  eyes  on  dead  faces 
which  yet  are  luminous  in  that  unearthly  light,  we 
feel  that  our  hope  is  not  irrational,  that  we  and 
they  are  not  all  of  the  earth,  that  the  land  from 
which  that  "  daylight  of  eternal  glory  "  falls  is  our 


92  THE  STEr-CIIILD   OF  TIME. 

land  as  well  as  this.  We  are  not  unscientific,  we 
believe,  in  holding  what  the  faith  reveals,  that  the 
dead-seeming  germs  of  the  earth  may  spring  to 
life  and  grow  and  blossom  in  the  airs  of  Paradise, 
and  that  this  world  may  turn  over,  after  its  own 
abject  failure,  the  perfect  outcome  of  all  its  de- 
velopment, the  crown  of  all  its  possibilities,  to 
other,  vaster  worlds,  and  other,  grander,  and 
more  awful  conditions,  as  a  germ  to  be  developed 
to  a  growth  unattained  and  unattainable  here,  and 
yet  always  prophesied  as  possible. 

But  let  us  step  out  of  the  twilight,  into  the 
enveloping  splendors  of  the  faith  revealed. 

"The  whole  creation  groaneth  and  travaileth 
in  pain  together  until  now." 

Out  of  the  pain,  out  of  the  writhings,  out  of  the 
sobs  and  cries  of  the  dying  Old,  shall  the  eternal 
New  be  born.  It  is  the  law  of  the  revelation,  it  is 
the  law  of  nature.  It  is  on  the  pages  of  the  Bible, 
of  human  history,  of  the  rock-ledges  of  the  earth. 
And  "  I  am  the  Resurrection  and  the  Life,"  saith 
the  Son  of  God.     He  was  also  the  Son  of  man. 


LECTURE   IV. 
THE  CHILD  IN  THE   MANGER. 


What  think  ye  of  Christ  ?     Whose  son  is  he  ? 

Matt.  xxii.  42. 


LECTURE    IV. 

THE  CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER. 

NEARLY  nineteen  hundred  years  ago,  lying  in 
the  feeding-trough  of  an  Eastern  khan,  some 
shepherds  found  at  midnight  the  new-born  child 
of  a  Jewish  artisan's  young  wife. 

There  are  always  vast  possibilities  in  childhood. 
You  cannot  tell  what  may  be  the  growth  from 
any  new  -  prepared  cradle.  The  sages  and  the 
heroes,  the  leaders  and  the  lords  of  men,  have  all 
lain  in  swaddling-clothes  —  as  have  the  tyrants 
and  the  greatly  evil,  the  criminals,  the  misleaders 
and  the  destroyers  of  men. 

The  cry  of  the  child  is  the  proclamation  of  a 
new  day.  God  rules  by  men,  makes  and  unmakes 
the  ages  by  men  ;  and  when  the  man-child  is  born, 
all  is  possible.  The  mother  croons  over  the  world's 
teacher  or  the  world's  master,  sings  her  lullaby 
over  the  guide  of  a  hundred  generations,  over  the 
lord  of  a  thousand  legions  —  who  can  tell  .-*  All 
things  are  possible  when  the  child  is  born. 

95 


96  rilE   CHILD   IN  THE  MANGER. 

Every  philosophy,  every  religion,  every  discov- 
ery, every  government,  has  slept  in  the  cradle 
with  some  child.  The  babe  in  swaddling-clothes 
is  the  germ-seed  of  all  power  on  earth. 
y-  Even  in  sending  His  own  Son  into  the  world, 
we  Christians  confess,  God  sends  him,  to  all 
appearance,  as  He  sends  other  helpers,  guides,  and 
\j  deliverers  of  men.  His  common  way  of  working, 
God  never  drops  needlessly.  The  Son  of  God 
does  not  come  with  blare  of  trumpet,  and  clash 
of  cymbal,  and  the  tramp  of  attending  legions. 
That  is  not  God's  method  upon  the  earth.  Only 
to  those  who  have  eyes  to  see  and  ears  to  hear, 
does  the  star  shine  and  do  the  angels  sing.  To 
outward  seeming,  the  Eternal  Son  sleeps  as  any 
child  may  sleep  under  a  mother's  watch,  and 
His  cradle-song  is  the  familiar  song  of  Judaean 
mothers. 

Yet  that  cradle  in  the  khan  at  Bethlehem 
sways  the  world.  Augustus  is  the  echo  of  a 
name,  hollow-sounding  on  the  blasts  of  the  dim 
years.  The  Child  in  Bethlehem  is  the  mightiest 
living  present  force  on  earth;  and  millions  of  the 
vanguard  of  mankind  bend  round  that  cradle,  as 
the  centre  of  the  world's  life  and  their  own,  across 
the  vast  spaces  and  the  long  years. 

The  Child  of  Bethlehem  was  a  germ  then.     God 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  97 

works,  in  the  revelation  of  Himself  and  the  salva- 
tion of  the  world,  as  He  works  in  other  things, 
concerning  men,  at  least.  We  recognize  the 
eternal  method  and  the  eternal  wisdom  in  the 
Babe  come  to  save  a  world.  "  The  kingdom  of 
God  cometh  not  with  observation." 

But  how  to  account  for  Jesus  of  Bethlehem,  — 
Jesus  Christ  of  Nazareth .''  Can  you  account  for 
any  ultimate  germ .-'  Science  is  dumb  on  ulti- 
mates.  It  traces  up  causes  from  effects,  Imk  by 
link  of  the  long  chain.  At  last  one  link  is 
reached,  and  beyond  there  is  nothing.  Omiic  exit 
in  mysteriiun.  The  last  step  is  into  the  profound. 
But  is  the  end  reached .-'  Are  there  no  causes 
and  no  consequences  beyond  the  touch  of  mate- 
rial hand  and  the  sight  of  material  eye  .-* 

We  can  account  for  other  men  by  things  upon 
the  earth  :  can  we  account  for  Jesus  Christ  .'*  Is 
He  a  product  of  the  earth,  and  can  we  find  that 
out  of  which  He  grew  }  Is  He,  like  other  men, 
a  development  from  visible  sources .''  Is  He 
explainable  by  sufficient  causes  .'' 

All  other  men  are.  In  a  most  true  sense,  every 
man  is  a  development.  Let  Him  be  as  exceptional 
as  you  will.  He  is  the  natural  product  of  natural 
causes  upon  which  you  may  lay  your  finger. 

Plato  is  as  genuine  a   Greek  product    as   the 


98  THE   CHILD   IN  THE   MANGER. 

Parthenon.  Under  no  other  sky  could  the  one 
have  grown,  or  the  other  been  builded. 

Men  are  the  result  of  race,  nationality,  culture, 
hereditary  tendencies,  and  so  on,  in  the  making  of 
their  characters,  —  the  kind  of  men  they  come  to 
be.  One  can  generally,  after  due  examination, 
discover  and  lay  down  the  causes  of  the  develop- 
ment into  such  a  shape. 

William  Shakspeare,  exceptional  as  is  his  vast 
genius,  is  an  Englishman  m  every  fibre,  just  as 
natural  a  product  of  English  soil  and  English  air, 
as  an  English  oak  or  an  English  daisy.  There 
are  causes  sufificient,  if  not  to  account  for  his 
exceptional  genius,  quite  enough  to  account  for 
the  form  that  genius  took,  for  his  whole  moral 
make-up  and  tendencies,  for  his  character  and  his 
influence.  Of  all  the  lands  on  earth,  we  are  sure 
England  alone  could  have  given  him  birth. 

And  not  only  England,  but  England  at  a  par- 
ticular time.  He  is  a  man  of  his  country,  but 
also  a  man  of  his  day  ;  a  product  of  his  race,  but 
a  product  at  a  particular  point  in  its  development. 
He  is  an  Elizabethan  Englishman.  He  belongs 
where  Spenser,  Bacon,  and  Raleigh  belong.  He 
has  the  common  stamp  of  the  great  Ouccn  upon 
him,  as  they  all  have.  Before  or  after  there  could 
have  been  no  Shakspeare,  as  there  has  not  been. 


77/^5"   CHILD   IN  THE  MANGER.  99 

Only  when  "  the  tawny  lioness  "  held  her  island 
lair  secure,  could  William  Shakspeare  have  lived 
and  written. 

I  name  another  name  on  the  roll  of  poetic  fame, 
the  only  one  perhaps  to  be  named  beside  him  ; 
his  to  whom  the  little  children  pointed  as  the  man 
"who  had  been  in  hell !"  the  awful  soul  who  trod 
the  hills  of  Paradise  and  the  dread  profound  of 
the  abyss,  and  sung  the  story  of  what  he  saw 
for  the  hearing  of  all  time,  —  Dante.  We  can, 
again,  account  for  Jiini.  He  is  a  natural  product 
of  his  race  and  time.  He  is  an  Italian,  and  of  all 
Italy  an  Italian  of  Florence,  and  of  Florence  in 
the  thirteenth  century. 

Take  the  exceptional  and  representative  man  of 
any  name,  and  he  is  always  clearly  an  outcome. 
Voltaire  is  a  French,  Goethe  a  German.  George 
Washington  is  a  natural  outcome  of  Saxon  and 
Norman  England,  —  the  representative  of  a  race 
of  independent,  God-fearing  English  gentlemen 
and  Churchmen,  transplanted  into  the  American 
Colonies,  but  into  one  special  colony,  Virginia. 

You  see  what  I  mean,  and  also  why  we  nat- 
urally, I  might  almost  say  instinctively,  turn  to 
the  examination  of  the  causes  which  have  pro- 
duced any  special  character,  and  expect  to  find 
them.      They   may,    indeed,    themselves    be    the 


lOO  THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER, 

germs  of  great  consequences,  the  original  sources 
of  vast  results  ;  but  they  are  not  ultimates.  They 
have  their  own  causes  on  the  earth,  and  are  but 
single  links  in  the  vast  chain  which  stretches 
backward  into  the  unknown  past,  as  it  docs  on- 
ward into  the  unknown  future. 

Is  it  thus  with  Jesus  Christ  ? 

And  here,  mark,  Jesus  Christ  was  expected.  It 
is  his  own  claim,  that  he  was  expected ;  that  he 
was  the  fulfilment  of  the  expectations  of  thirty 
centuries ;  that  he  was  looked  for,  longed  for, 
prayed  for.  No  other  man  ever  was  expected. 
Christ  is  singular  in  this. 

The  literature  of  a  whole  people  is  filled  with 
an  expected  man.  Indeed,  on  close  examination, 
the  expectation  of  a  man  is  the  central  meaning 
of  that  literature.  The  kind  of  man  desired  is 
clearly  laid  down.  There  is  no  place  either  to 
doubt  the  character  of  him  who  was  to  be  the 
culmination,  the  splendid  blossom,  of  a  long  his- 
tory and  a  nation's  epic.  The  ideal  is  magnifi- 
cent, and  it  is  also  distinct. 

It  is  the  vision  of  all  the  seers,  the  proclama- 
tion of  all  the  prophets.  It  begins  at  the  gate  of 
Paradise,  with  the  seed  that  tramples  on  the 
serpent  ;  grows  clearer  to  Abraham  and  Jacob ; 
distinctly  defines  itself  to  Moses;  is  sung  by  David 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  TO  I 

to  his  lyre  ;  in  Solomon's  great  temple,  swells  in 
magnificent  chant  upon  the  incense-laden  air, 
while  the  trumpets  peal,  and  the  harp-strings 
quiver  in  the  chorus.  Amid  the  ruins  of  the 
temple  and  the  city,  the  expected  man  is  still  the 
burden  of  Isaiah's  song  ;  and  his  splendid  com- 
ing flames  afar  through  Jeremiah's  tears.  In 
captivity,  by  the  waters  of  Babylon,  still  the 
man  is  expected.  And  the  literature  of  a  whole 
people  ends  where  it  begins,  with  a  prophecy  of 
his  quick  coming,  and  the  manner  of  his  appear- 
ance. Malachi  closes  the  Book.  It  is  still  the 
old  story.  "  The  Lord  whom  ye  seek  shall  sud- 
denly come  to  his  temple,  even  the  messenger 
of  the  covenant,  whom  ye  delight  in  ;  he  shall 
come,  saith  the  Lord  of  hosts." 

It  is  this  that  gives  a  peculiar  character  to  the 
Old  Testament.  It  is  a  national  literature,  re- 
member. It  is  unique  in  this,  —  that  it  is  a 
literature  of  hope.  It  is  always  looking  on,  and 
the  vision  it  beholds  is  never  dimmed  by  any 
vapors  of  the  lower  atmosphere. 

When  Babylon  falls,  no  Chaldasan  sage  stands 
among  the  ruins  to  prophesy  in  stately  strains 
of  a  new  Babylon,  and  a  new  and  wiser  Chaldaea. 
When  Rome  falls,  no  voice  in  Forum  or  Senate- 
house,  no  orator,  no  poet,  tells  or  sings  of  a  newer 


I02  THE   CHILD   IN  THE  MANGER. 

Rome  to  be  built  upon  the  ruins  of  the  old 
Only  a  voice  from  far  away,  trained  in  the  cadences 
of  Hebrew  speech,  —  a  Christian  voice,  —  St. 
Augustine's,  chants  the  grand  epic  of  the  City 
of  God,  and  is  not  drowned  in  the  crash  of  an 
empire  thundering  to  the  dust. 

But  when  Jerusalem  falls,  Isaiah,  and  Jeremiah 
while  he  breaks  his  heart  in  lamentation,  stand 
amid  the  ruins  of  city  and  temple,  and  in  a  land 
made  desolate,  and  sing  triumphantly  of  a  new 
Israel,  a  new  and  eternal  temple,  another  David 
and  another  Solomon  who  shall  reign  forever. 
The  fringes  of  the  darkness  of  the  day  of  blood 
and  smoke  are  luminous  with  the  glory  of  the 
eternal  day  that  waits  behind  the  far-off  hills  for 
its  full  arising. 

All  other  races  have  dreamed  of  a  golden  age,  ^ 
but  their  golden  age  lay  behind.  Themselves 
walk  upon  an  earth  of  iron,  under  a  heavens  of 
brass.  Things  had  been  growing  worse  and 
worse  since  the  splendid  dawning,  and  shall 
grow  worse  and  worse  until  the  last  crash  and 
final  wreck  of  time  and  hope. 

But  the  Old  Testament  always  places  the 
golden  age  before.  The  great  Day  of  the  Lord, 
in  gloom  or  glory,  is  a  day  coming.  It  waits 
behind    all    temj)oral    shadows.      Whatever    else 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  IO3 

fails,  it  shall  not  fail.  The  best  is  yet  to  come. 
The  brightest  is  yet  to  dawn.  And  so  the  nation 
in  its  darkest  hour  of  failure,  in  defeat,  in  captiv- 
ity, in  ruin  uttermost  to  outward  seeming,  never 
despairs.  Its  wailing  litanies  by  the  waters  of  . 
Babylon,  burst  at  last  into  chants  of  victorious 
anticipation;  and  their  refrain  is,  "Glory  to  the 
Lord  who  redeemeth  Israel." 

And  so  this  nation  never  dies.  All  others 
crumble  to  the  dust,  —  the  proudest  and  the 
strongest.  Vanquished  or  victor,  Israel  lives,  and 
lives  yet,  scattered  and  peeled,  but  somehow  vital, 
virile,  persistent.  Israel  is  the  heir  of  hope,  the  /v- 
race  that  always  looked  forward. 

And  the  man  expected  is  a  Prince,  a  Conqueror, 
a  Deliverer.  He  comes  in  might.  He  comes 
with  joy,  he  comes  with  terror.  "  Who  may  abide 
the  day  of  his  coming }  Who  shall  stand  when  he 
appeareth  .-• "  "A  refiner  and  purifier  of  silver." 
By  the  red  furnace-mouth  he  sits,  and  the  white 
flame  leaps  and  glows  ;  and  there  in  the  fierce 
blinding  heat  he  tries  the  souls  of  men. 

Surely  the  brooding  of  three  thousand  years 
shall  bring  its  birth.  Surely  a  nation's  long 
yearning  after  its  ideal  shall  see  the  ideal  real- 
ized. If  there  be  power  in  ancestral  desire,  in 
hereditary  type,  in  the   fixed   conception    of   the 


I04  THE   CHILD  IN   THE  MANGER. 

generations,  we  shall  know  the  man  when  he 
comes,  and  say,  "  Out  of  a  race's  throes  this 
man  was  born.  He  bears  the  marks  of  his  de- 
scent. The  race  has  stamped  him  for  its  own, 
and  acknowledges  its  son,  —  the  son  of  its  heart, 
and  its  long  desire." 

And  is  this  the  outcome  ?  This  Child  the 
shepherds  find  in  the  cattle-trough  ?  Does  the 
vision  of  ages  end  in  this }  a  nation's  hopes  fulfil 
themselves  here  .'' 

Do  you  wonder  "  His  own  received  Him  not  "  } 
I  say  He  claims  to  be  the  one  expected,  and  lo ! 
He  is  denied.  "  He  hath  no  form  nor  comeliness, 
that"  they  "should  desire  Him."  The  verdict  of 
the  race  was,  that  He  was  not  a  development  from 
any  thing  among  them.  They  declined  to  recog- 
nize Him  as  any  product  of  their  religion  or  their 
prophecy.  He  was  a  blank  disappointment.  And 
above  all  men  they  ought  to  have  known. 

'The  way  all  connected  with  His  coming  flatly 
contradict  the  expectation  He  came,  according  to 
Himself,  to  fulfil,  is  surely  startling.  He  seems  as 
if  he  set  Himself  directly  against  all  that  was  con- 
ceived of  Him,  or  said  about  Him.  The  angels 
sang,  "  Peace  on  earth,  good-will  to  men."  Within 
a  few  days,  in  consequence  of  His  birth,  the 
mothers   of   Bethlehem   were   wailinq;   over  their 


THE   CHILD  IN   THE  MANGER.  105 

murdered  babes.  And  when  He  comes  to  teach, 
he  declares,  "  I  am  not  come  to  send  peace,  but  a 
sword." 

It  is  surely,  on  any  but  His  own  explanation, 
a  very  curious  thing  this,  —  that,  claiming  to  be 
the  Messiah,  He  flatly  refuses  to  be  the  Messiah  of 
the  whole  race's  conception,  and  is  a  Messiah  after 
an  utterly  new  type  and  model,  without  existence 
in  the  national  consciousness. 

There  can  be  no  clearer  way  of  declaring  that 
He  declines  to  be  held  the  product  of  such  con- 
sciousness. He  has  no  mark  or  likeness  of  it. 
As  far  as  that  consciousness  goes.  He  is  entirely 
new.  He  is  not  rooted  in,  does  not  spring  from, 
it,  or  grow  out  of  it,  —  is  in  all  ways  alien. 

But  if  the  age  long  yearning  for  a  particular 
type  had  no  result  in  this  Man,  if  three  thousand 
years  of  intense  national  character  and  national 
desire  cannot  account  for  the  Man  who  claimed 
to  fulfil  that  character  and  be  that  desire,  can 
the  existing  national  character  and  condition  at 
the  time  account  for  Him  as  its  result  .-* 

His  environment  is  distinct  enough.  The 
national  influence  into  which  He  was  born  was 
one  of  the  most  powerful  and  well-marked  ever 
known.  Is  there  any  thing  in  it  to  account  for 
Jesus  of  Nazareth  ? 


I06  THE   CrULD   IN   THE  MANGER. 

There  was  intense  race  prejudice  and  coherence. 
The  Jew  was  a  narrow,  isolated  man,  who  would 
neither  dwell  nor  eat  with  any  not  a  Jew.  All 
other  men  were  counted  alien  from  his  sympathy 
or  association.  Could  the  Man  who  told  the 
story  of  the  Good  Samaritan  —  and  the  Samari- 
tans were  most  hated  and  despised — be  the 
product  of  the  Jewish  feeling  of  his  time .-' 

And  their  religion.  It  had  a  profound  formative 
influence  upon  character,  none  ever  stronger  or 
more  profound.  Out  of  which  of  its  rabbinical 
schools  come  the  words,  "  But  I  say  unto  you, 
Love  your  enemies  ;  bless  them  which  curse  you ; 
pray  for  them  which  despitcfully  use  you  "  .-• 

That  religion  had  reduced  itself  in  His  day,  and 
indeed  long  before,  to  a  perfunctory  observance  of 
outward  ceremonies.  It  had  formulated  a  shrewd 
casuistry,  by  which  it  proposed  to  keep  the  law  in 
the  letter,  and  break  it  in  the  spirit.  From  birth 
to  death  a  man  was  surrounded  by  its  mechanism, 
and  his  whole  life  was  fettered  by  its  minute 
rigidity  of  ceremony  out  of  which  the  soul  had 
long  since  fled. 

Whence  came  the  word,  "The  hour  cometh 
when  ye  shall  neither  in  Jerusalem  nor  yet  in  this 
mountain  worship  the  Father.  God  is  a  Spirit, 
and  they  that  worship  Him    must  worship    Him 


THE   CHILD   IN  THE  MANGER.  lO/ 

in  spirit  and  in  truth  "  ?  Or  this  :  "It  is  the  spirit 
that  quickeneth  ;  the  flesh  profiteth  nothing"  ?  Or 
this  :  "  Tlie  kingdom  of  God  is  within  you  "  ? 

Nay,  one  need  not  dwell  upon  the  wonderful 
differences.  I  am  aware  that  there  are  those  who 
have  claimed  to  find  Christianity  in  the  Talmud. 
Unhappily  for  the  fancy,  the  Talmud  is  far  too 
recent  for  the  purpose.  What  we  know  is  the 
character  of  the  practical  Judaism  when  Christ 
came,  and  we  know  also  the  judgment  of  the 
people  and  the  people's  leaders,  of  the  common 
folk  and  the  priesthood  and  the  teachers ;  and 
both  agreed  that  instead  of  Christ's  doctrine  and 
character  being  a  natural  outgrowth  of  Judaism, 
they  were  so  great  a  contradiction  and  outrage 
upon  it,  that  the  inevitable  end  for  them  was  : 
"  We  found  this  fellow  perverting  the  nation. 
Away  with  him  !  crucify  him  !  "  Far  better  than 
any  scholar,  of  whatsoever  name,  brought  up  in 
a  Christian  atmosphere  with  Christian  influences 
all  about  him,  did  the  men  of  his  own  day  know 
whether  Christ  Jesus  was  a  natural  product  of  the 
national  sentiment  and  the  race  faith. 

His  life  was  spent  wholly  in  Judaea.  There  is 
no  record,  not  even  a  suspicion,  of  His  having 
been  subjected  to  any  other  than  Israelitish  in- 
fluences.     He   was,    like    His    great    apostle,   a 


I08  TITE   CITILD   IN   THE   MANGER. 

Hebrew  of  the  Hebrews ;  but  not  like  him  a 
Roman  citizen,  and  a  man  trained  in  Greek  phi- 
losophy. 

But,  admitting  it  possible  that  Roman  and 
Greek  influences  were  in  the  air,  can  one  or  both 
together  account  for  Jesus  of  Nazareth  ? 

There  is  no  mistake  possible  about  the  outcome 
of  Greek  thought,  or  the  character  that  Greek  in- 
fluence would  form.  There  was  the  worship  of 
beauty  in  sculpture,  painting,  or  literary  expres- 
sion ;  the  passionate  search  for,  and  admiration  of, 
clear  human  thinking  and  its  expression.  "The 
Greeks  seek  after  wisdom."  There  was  the  pride 
of  culture,  and  the  confidence  in  human  reason  ; 
and  a  contempt  for  the  uncultured,  the  barbarians, 
in  fit  ratio. 

Is  this  word  from  the  Academy  or  the  Porch  ? 
"  Blessed  are  the  meek  ;  blessed  are  the  poor  in 
spirit ;  blessed  are  they  that  mourn." 

One  can  scarce  imagine  any  thing  more  foreign 
to  Greek  thought  and  Greek  philosophy,  than  the 
whole  teaching  and  the  whole  life  of  Christ. 
Whatever  else  may  be  said  of  Him,  the  slightest 
knowledge  of  the  question  compels  one  to  say 
this  man  was  no  Greek. 

Was  he  a  Roman  .-'  Born  in  the  Roman  Empire 
he  was,  and  about  Him  were  the  Roman  laws  and 


THE   Cnri.D  IN   THE   MANGER.  IO9 

the  Roman  arms.  Was  He  a  product  of  the  mighty 
force  that  built  the  seven-hilled  mistress  of  the 
world,  and  ruled  the  nations  at  her  feet  ? 

There  was  formative  power  enough  in  the  Ro- 
man national  character.  No  more  mighty  force  in 
moulding  men  after  one  type  ever  existed,  and  the 
type  is  unmistakable.  The  echoing  tramp  of 
the  legions  shakes  Europe.  The  Roman  stamps 
himself  for  all  time  wherever  his  foot  treads.  He 
is  "  the  lord  of  things,"  the  law-maker  and  the 
law-executor.  Iron-handed,  iron-hearted,  he  goes 
everywhere,  to  trample  down,  break  in  pieces,  and 
compel  peoples  to  his  obedience.  His  pride  is 
beyond  weakness.  It  is  sublime.  He  meets  no 
superior  on  earth.  He  scarce  acknowledges  a  su- 
perior in  the  heavens.  He  and  his  race  and  his 
city,  his  senate,  his  legions,  and  his  laws,  are 
a  part  of  the  fixed  order  of  the  universe,  and 
eternal. 

"  Blessed  are  the  peacemakers."  Is  that  word 
an  echo  from  the  Senate-Chamber  or  the  shouting 
Forum  .''  "He  that  is  greatest  among  you  shall 
be  your  servant."  "  The  Son  of  man  came  not 
to  be  served,  but  to  serve."  Can  one  imagine 
words  more  utterly  against  every  Roman  concep- 
tion of  human  life  and  fitting  human  opinion  } 
And  the  manner  of  the  life,  and  the  end  of  the 


no  THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER. 

life,  both  outrage  every  Roman  sentiment  of 
duty,  fitness,  and  human  dignity. 

By  the  law  of  the  case,  there  must  be  cause 
sufficient  to  explain  every  man.  He  is  what  he  is, 
from  sufficient  power  to  make  him  so.  He  is  a 
product.  Heredity,  environment,  and  the  rest 
make  him.  But  when  you  try  the  law  on  this 
Man,  it  fails.  The  human  intellect  is  challenged 
to  explain  Him  by  the  known  methods  of  making 
men.  He  has  no  race-mark.  He  bears  no  birth- 
mark. Intellectually,  morally,  he  is  like  his 
shadowy  type  in  the  elder  day,  —  Melchizedek, 
"  without  father,  without  mother,  without  descent, 
having  neither  beginning  of  days  nor  end  of  life." 
He  stands  in  lonely  majesty  a  Man,  simply  the 
Son  of  man  as  He  called  Himself,  the  type  of  the 
race  as  it  should  be,  with  no  narrower  character 
upon  Him  than  manhood  ;'so  infinite  a  manhood, 
that  Jew  and  Greek  and  Roman  accept  him  as 
their  Brother  and  their  Kmg,  that  savage  man  and 
civilized  man,  black  man  and  white,  the  man  of 
Jerusalem  and  the  man  of  New  York,  alike  recog- 
nize Him  as  their  vision  of  human  perfection,  of 
human  beauty,  wisdom,  goodness,  and  jiower. 

He  is  of  no  race,  therefore  he  is  of  all.  And 
each  sees  in  him  his  own.  The  painters  are  our 
witnesses.     The  Italian,  filled  with  his  conception 


THE   CHILD   IN  THE  MANGER.  Ill 

of  the  perfect  humanity,  paints  an  Italian  Christ ; 
the  German,  putting  his  ideal  upon  canvas,  paints 
a  German  Christ ;  and  the  English  painter  makes 
the  face  looking  down  upon  you  an  English  face. 
Even  the  poor  village  artist  of  Central  America, 
working  with  pigments  from  the  leaves  and  roots 
of  the  forest,  to  make  a  picture  for  the  rude  parish 
church,  will  paint  an  Aztec  Christ. 

Jesus  Christ  is  Himself,  then,  one  of  the  ulti- 
mate producing  forces.  We  are  driven  back  to 
that.  The  Child  in  the  manger  is  an  ultimate 
germ  ;  the  Seed  itself,  as  He  is  the  Branch  ;  the 
Root  of  Jesse  and  of  David.  "  If  David  calleth 
Him  Lord,  how  is  He  then  his  Son .-' "  We  can 
answer:  — 

Into  the  realm  of  the  natural,  a  new  force  was 
born  that  night  in  Bethlehem.  The  Divine  en- 
tered upon  the  plane  of  the  human.  No  other 
explanation  is  adequate  to  the  facts. 

But  Nature  is  God's  ;  the  human  is  God's ;  and 
even  here  the  new  force  and  life,  in  coming,  comes 
as  God  works  in  the  realm  of  His  appearing.  He 
comes  not  as  a  man  crowned  with  power,  or 
laurelled  with  wisdom,  triumphantly  entering  on 
his  career.  He  comes,  the  new  life  of  men,  as  a 
germ  out  of  which  light,  life,  and  salvation  shall 
develop.     It  is  in  strict  accord  with  all  we  learn 


112  THE   CHILD  IX  THE  MAXGER. 

from  God's  working,  that  He  should  come  as  a 
child,  and  be  found  in  the  cradle.  The  sraall  hands 
hold  the  earth.  The  small  manger  contains  the 
seed  to  sow  the  world  for  all  time,  —  the  seed  and 
the  sower  both.  But  only  they  that  have  eyes  see 
the  Child  ;  only  the  scientific  intelligence  sees  the 
oak  of  centuries  in  the  sraall  acorn  at  one's  feet. 

But  while  the  revelation  is  that  of  an  ultimate 
germ,  which  has  no  cause  nor  antecedent  in  time 
or  matter,  —  the  beginning  of  a  new  life  for  man 
upon  the  earth,  —  and  while,  upon  examination, 
reason  accords  with  revelation,  the  same  revelation 
shows  again  that  the  enxironment  of  the  germ,  so 
to  speak,  the  place  and  soil  and  circumstances, 
were  what  we  call  natural  developments  of  the 
earth  ;  that  is,  they  are  such  part  of  God's  working 
as  we  can  see  and  note,  and  draw  inferences  about, 
which  is  what  we  mean  and  all  we  mean  by 
natural 

For  this  Child  was  bom  in  the  fulness  of  time, 
at  a  particular  period  and  in  a  particular  place, 
when  the  world  was  ready  for  him,  and  the  devel- 
opment might  begin. 

To  speak  in  the  tongue  of  our  time,  the  en\'iron- 
ment  was  prepared  by  natural  development  for 
the  new  germ,  while  the  germ  itself  was  a  new 
seed,  to  begin  a  new  era. 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  I  1 3 

And  why  should  one  stumble  at  this  ?  Human 
history  is  not  a  succession  of  accidents.  There 
is  a  law  in  the  story.  Things  grow  from  one 
another,  and  events  have  natural  beginning,  and 
a  reasonable  course  and  end,  if  we  can  but  find  it. 

It  is  this  that  philosophic  history  seeks  to 
trace,  else  the  story  is  a  mere  bundle  of  dates. 
You  make  a  chronolog)',  and  a  chronology  is  not 
a  history. 

The  story  moves  upon  its  various  lines,  and  the 
lines  converge  and  focus  themselves  in  some  out- 
come, some  crisis ;  an  ending  of  the  old,  a  begin- 
ning of  the  new ;  the  fruit  of  one  series,  the  germ 
of  another ;  an  ending  and  yet  a  beginning. 

So  Church  historians  have  shown  us  how  the 
past  gathered  itself  into  one  present,  for  the 
coming  of  the  Lord.  And  they  are  right  and 
scientific.  But  He,  as  we  have  seen,  is  not  the 
outcome.  That  outcome  is  the  world  preparing 
itself  and  making  ready  for  the  cry,  "  Behold,  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  is   at  hand." 

For  that  day  all  Jewish  history  had  been  look- 
ing and  waiting.  The  nation,  in  its  slavery  in 
Egypt,  in  its  wandering  in  the  desert,  in  its 
conquest  of  the  land  promised,  and  in  its  peace 
and  rest  under  Solomon,  in  its  splendors  and 
its  decay  alike,  had  been  preparing.     Moses  gave 


114  ^-^^^   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  ^ 

the  law  for  it,  Joshua  conquered  the  Canaanites 
for  it,  David  fought  and  Solomon  ruled  that  it 
might  come.  And  over  all  the  world  the  people 
were  scattered,  and  their  land  was  a  Roman  prov- 
ince, that  Moses  might  be  "preached  in  every 
city,"  and  that  the  synagogues  might  be  ready 
for  the  first  preaching  of  the  faith. 

At  no  time  as  at  this  time,  —  before  certainly 
not,  and  after  certainly  not,  —  was  the  situation 
of  Israel  such  as  to  make  the  preaching  of  the 
gospel  to  all  nations  effectual  from  itself  as  a 
basis.  But  now  everywhere  throughout  the  em- 
pire, in  Rome  as  in  Corinth  or  Alexandria,  was 
the  idea  of  a  one  unseen,  eternal,  and  only  God, 
to  be  worshipped  without  image,  altar,  or  bloody 
sacrifice,  made  common  among  polytheists  and 
idolaters.  The  synagogue  worship,  uncommanded 
in,  extraneous  to,  the  Scriptures,  seems  to  have  its 
Divine  authority  sufficiently  in  this,  —  that  every- 
where it  was  holding  up  its  testimony  of  the 
Divine  oneness,  and  that  God  is  a  Spirit,  to  be 
worshipped  in  spirit,  and  that  so  the  synagogue 
stood  ready  for  the  apostle  when  he  came  to 
complete  the  testimony  by  preaching  that  "God 
hatli  revealed  Himself  in   His  Son." 

But  not  Israel  only  had  been  guided  for  this, 
and  in  this  its  story  made  coherent,  purposeful. 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  II5 

Babylon  rose  for  this,  and  fell ;  and  Nineveh, 
and  Tyre  and  Sidon,  and  Tadmor  in  the  wilder- 
ness. And  in  the  dark,  unnoticed,  by  the  Tiber, 
the  outlaws  built  their  first  rude  fortification, 
and  founded  Rome.  And  slowly,  still  unknown 
to  the  great  Oriental  peoples,  the  germ  so  planted 
grew.  The  little  tribal  wars,  so  insignificant  in 
themselves,  were  fought.  The  kings  were  ex- 
pelled, and  the  Republic  made  its  consuls.  The 
whole  story  of  the  building  of  Rome  unfolds 
itself  in  battles,  intrigues,  struggles  ot  leaders, 
writhings  and  herce  pains  of  the  people,  —  a  very 
wolf's  litter,  bloody  and  hungry  on  the  prey,  — 
till  out  of  all  comes  the  great,  strong,  masterful 
people,  who,  "  dreadful  and  terrible  and  strong 
exceedingly,"  lorded  it  over  a  submissive  world. 

For  their  laws  had  grown,  and  their  order  and 
discipline,  and  a  certain  conception  of  life  as  a 
place  of  duty  and  labor.  There  had  grown, 
amidst  all  the  cruelty  and  wrong,  some  types  of 
manful  character,  of  strong,  righteous  men,  of 
pure,  faithful  women.  Noble  examples  stand  all 
along  the  story ;  and,  like  all  other  peoples,  they 
got  their  day's  wages,  —  the  thing  they  had , 
worked  for  and  deserved. 

But  is  the  end  of  all  Rome's  splendid  story  to 
be  the  later  Caesars,  and  the  overwhelming  rush 


Il6  THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER. 

of  the  barbarians  ?  Had  Rome  no  purpose  ? 
Did  the  she-wolf's  litter  roam  the  earth  for 
naught  ?  Nay,  we  dare  to  say,  the  purpose  of 
Rome  was  a  divine  purpose,  and  the  great  empire 
was  built  on  the  foundation,  laid  in  mire  and  dark- 
ness, and  the  sweat  and  blood  of  men,  for  the 
new  Kingdom  of  God. 

The  great  roads  ran  from  the  city  to  the 
empire's  bounds,  that  St.  Paul  might  travel  swiftly 
to  preach  the  gospel.  The  Mediterranean  was 
whitened  with  the  sails  of  the  ships,  that  the 
story  might  be  carried  by  the  winds  and  the 
waves.  One  power  ruled,  that  under  its  shadow 
there  might  be  protection  ;  for  even  an  apostle 
to  fulfil  his  purpose  might  need  to  say,  "  Civis 
Romaims  sum,'"  and  appeal  to  Caesar. 
|,  And  when  persecution  should  come,  as  it  was 
I  sure  to  come,  fierce  and  exterminating,  there 
was  a  limit  even  to  its  madness  in  the  fact  that 
the  persecution,  after  all,  was  in  a  land  of  law,  and 
must  be  conducted  under  forms  ot  law.  Christi- 
anity might  have  been  exterminated  in  Rome  as 
it  was  in  Persia,  except  that  the  bloodiest  Roman 
emperor  was  still  a  constitutional  ruler,  and  there 
were  laws  which  even  a  Nero  or  a  Tiberius  could 
not  always  trample  on.  Tiic  forms  of  law  and 
the  sacred  Roman  right  stood  between  the  perse- 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  11/ 

cutor  and  the  victim ;  and  Christians  could  not, 
behind  them,  be  slain  so  fast  as  Christians  were 
made. 

To  make  the  world  ready  for  the  Child  in  the 
manger,  and  what  the  Child  should  bring,  the 
legions  marched,  and  the  pro-consuls  ruled, 
the  Senate  decreed,  the  augurs  looked  for  the 
auspices,  the  "Twelve  Gods'  stood  in  marble 
silence  behind  their  altars. 

For  this,  Pompey  conquered  the  East ;  for  this, 
"  the  foremost  man  of  all  the  world  "  shook  the 
German  forests  and  the  far-off  shores  of  Britain 
with  the  onset  of  the  invincible  arms  ;  for  this, 
Augustus  ruled  with  all  his  political  cunning  ;  for 
this,  he  decreed  that  "all  the  world  should  be 
taxed,"  —  for  this  :  that  the  Child  should  be  born 
in  Bethlehem,  be  cradled  in  the  manger  of  the 
crowded  khan,  and  die,  at  last,  a  Roman  death, 
under  a  Roman  indictment,  by  the  cross,  and  not 
a  Jewish  death  by  stoning. 

But  Roman  preparation  was  not  enough,  even 
in  its  ripeness.  The  hour  waits  till  Rome  has  not 
only  done  her  own  work,  but  absorbed  the  work 
of  others,  reaching  her  own  crisis,  gathering  into 
herself  the  past. 

Not  peace  only,  and  an  ordered  world,  and  the 
settled  facilities  of  intercourse  over  vast  spaces. 


Il8  THE   CHILD   IN   THE  MANGER. 

among  the  men  of  three  continents,  were  needed 
for  the  carriage  and  the  spread  of  the  world's  new 
story  from  the  manger ;  but  a  language  in  which 
to  tell  it,  a  universal  tongue  spoken  in  Asia,  in 
Africa,  in  Europe,  in  Marseilles,  in  Alexandria, 
In  Jerusalem,  and  in  Rome,  —  a  language  of  com- 
mon intercourse  in  the  mart  and  on  the  quay,  that 
common  men  might  hear,  and  yet  a  language  so 
developed  by  orator  and  poet  and  philosopher  that 
it  might  fitly  hold  this  most  wondrous  of  all 
stories,  and  convey  the  spiritual  power  it  in- 
folded. 

The  Roman  had  no  word  for  repentance,  no 
word  for  Saviour,  none  for  the  Anointed  Himself. 
He  did  not  repent,  the  stern  materialist,  the  stoic 
of  time.  He  needed  no  Saviour.  The  pilum  and 
the  short-sword  should  save  him,  or  he  died.  His 
tongue  was  barren  of  spiritual  power.  It  must 
be  converted  itself  before  it  could  say  the  alpha- 
bet of  the  Child. 

The  Roman  must  absorb  Greece  before  he 
found  a  language  for  the  good  news  of  Bethlehem. 

And  there  the  language  waited  for  St.  Paul  at 
Athens,  for  the  Gospel  of  St.  John,  for  the  plain 
though  hesitating  pen  of  St.  Peter. 

The  richest  and  most  wonderful  tongue  ever 
spoken  among  men  receives  into  its  most  pcrma- 


THE   CHILD  IN  THE  MANGER.  IIQ 

nent  literature,  and  as  the  choicest  treasure  it 
holds  for  all  ages,  the  New  Testament,  all  penned 
by  foreign  hands,  all  filled  by  thought  foreign  to 
Greek  intellect. 

And  we  may  say  that  Homer  wandered  and 
sang  the  "Ballad  of  Troy  Town,"  that  yEschy- 
lus  wrought  high  tragedies,  that  Demosthenes 
thundered  in  the  Agora,  that  Socrates  questioned 
among  his  scholars,  and  Plato  taught  and  thought 
and  wrote,  that  Themistocles  and  Miltiades 
fought,  that  Alexander  conquered,  that  Athens 
shone  white  across  the  sea,  and  the  Acropolis 
gleamed  in  pillared  splendor,  —  that  all  the  story 
of  Greece,  like  all  the  story  of  Rome,  unrolled  and 
developed  till  the  time  came  for  the  Child  in  the 
manger ! 

It  is  a  line  of  thought  familiar,  no  doubt.  But 
it  bears  recalling,  for  it  is  reasonable  and  true. 
In  the  visions  of  strange  things  seen  by  the 
waters  of  Ulai,  the  future  unrolls  itself  to  Daniel. 
But  that  unfoldment  is  a  genuine  development ; 
and  when  the  vision  becomes  history  we  can  read 
the  ordered  law  by  which  all  things  moved  in 
their  sequences  till  the  kingdoms  of  the  ancient 
world  had  made  ready  the  time  for  "  the  eternal 
kingdom  of  the  saints  of  the  Most  High." 

So  there  is  a  half-truth  in  the  thought  of  those 


I20  THE   CTTTLD  IJV  THE  MANGER. 

who  imagine  the  faith  a  development.  There  is 
a  half-truth  in  every  falsehood.  The  divine  reli- 
gion has  its  human  side  as  well  as  its  divine.  The 
"treasure,"  in  the  largest  sense,  is  "in  earthen 
vessels."  The  environment  for  Christ  and  Chris- 
tianity is  developed  in  what  we  blindly  call  the 
natural  order,  but  the  environment  does  not  make 
Christ. 

I  say,  "blindly  call  the  natural  order."  For,  to 
one  who  believes  in  a  living  God,  that  "the  Power 
behind  phenomena "  is  present,  imminent,  with 
will,  purpose,  judgment,  righteousness,  and  mercy, 
—  that,  in  truth,  God  rules  and  reigns  among  the 
kingdoms  of  men,  and  all  things  move  according 
to  an  all-wise  will,  from  an  empire's  ruin  to  a 
sparrow's  fall,  —  the  natural  is  itself  the  super- 
natural, and  the  world's  secular  story  is  divine. 

The  principle  gives  us  the  Christian  philosophy 
of  history,  —  all  things  developing  the  time  and 
place  for  the  cradle  once,  all  things  since  working 
and  unfolding  for  the  great  day  of  the  King's 
coronation,  a  redeemed  earth  and  a  ransomed 
humanity. 

And  so  as  when  the  promise  was  given  to  man, 
beginning  his  world-long  fight  with  evil,  "The 
woman's  seed  shall  bruise  his  head,"  we  are  still 
the  heirs  of  the  future,  "the  prisoners  of  hope." 


THE   CHILD  TN  THE  MANGER.  121 

Still  the  great  splendor  gleams  afar.  Still  we 
keep  our  Advents  with  our  Lents,  and  look  for 
the  day  of  His  appearing;  while  we  turn  daily 
to  the  temptation,  the  struggle,  and  the  failure  of 
the  common  life. 

For  we  know  not  the  small  nor  the  great,  nor 
whether  this  from  our  hands  shall  grow  or  that. 
But  we  do  know  that  the  great  harvests  of  God 
are  ripening ;  that  the  great  year  of  God,  for  man 
and  the  world,  is  coming ;  that  all  things,  day  and 
night,  develop  to  a  new  crisis  for  a  new  Seed  that 
shall  make  a  new  world. 

We  are  content,  in  all  the  dark  and  doubt,  to 
believe  as  our  great  Christian  poet  sings,  — 

"In  one  far-off  divine  event, 
To  which  the  whole  creation  moves." 

We  have  seen  the  Divine  seed,  root,  and  germ, 
come  in  His  time,  when  the  time  was  ripe,  — 
come  Child  in  the  manger,  and  grow  to  master 
the  world  and  men,  and  give  a  sense  and  purpose 
to  human  life. 

Shall  not  the  long,  blind  writhing  and  groping 
of  the  ages  grow  into  that  other  day,  —  always 
rosy  on  the  far-off  hills,  always  palpitating  down 
into  the  dark  again,  which  yet  leads  us,  as  it  led 
our   fathers,  —  the    day   when    the    Babe    in    the 


122  TflE   CHTLD   /JV   THE  MANGER. 

manger  shall  be  crowned  "  King  of  kings  and 
Lord  of  lords  "  ? 

Yea,  for  this  God  vvorketh  hitherto,  and  man 
worketh.  There,  too,  the  Divine  and  the  human 
meet ;  and,  mystery  that  it  is,  the  Divine  v^aits 
upon  the  human,  —  the  seed  waits  the  seed-bed. 

And  it  is  ours  to  hasten  or  delay  the  Day  of 
God! 


LECTURE   V. 
THE  SEED  GROWING  SECRETLY. 


"But  I  say  ttiito  yoit,  That  ye  resist  not  cz'il;  bid  luhosocver  shall 
smite  thee  0)1  thy  right  cheek,  turn  to  him  the  other  also.  And  if 
any  man  will  site  thee  at  the  latu,  and  take  away  thy  coat,  let  him 
have  thy  cloak  also.  And  "whosoever  shall  compel  thee  to  go  a  mile, 
go  with  him  twain.  Give  to  him  that  asketh  of  thee,  and  from 
him  that  would  l>orro7u  of  thee,  turn  not  thou  away.  —  St.  Mat- 
THEw's  Gospel,  v.  39,40,41,42. 


LECTURE   V. 
THE  SEED  GROWING  SECRETLY. 

THREE  chapters  of  the  Gospel  according  to 
St.  Matthew  consist  of  what  is  called  "  The 
Sermon  on  the  Mount." 

It  is  the  first  recorded  teaching  of  our  Lord 
at  length,  after  His  entrance  upon  His  ministry. 

The  circumstances  are  sufficiently  striking. 
"  Great  multitudes,"  gathered  by  the  fame  of 
His  miracles  and  His  strange  words,  surrounded 
Him;  and  while  these  thronged  the  slope,  He 
took  his  seat  upon  the  mountain-side,  and  taught 
them. 

He  had  come  to  begin  a  new  era,  —  to  found 
the  long-expected  kingdom  of  God.  His  speech 
on  this  occasion,  so  carefully  preserved,  may  be 
looked  upon  as  a  proclamation,  as,  in  fact,  the 
official  declaration  of  the  organic  law  of  that 
kingdom  as    a   living   power  upon  the  earth. 

The  Sermon  on  the  Mount  has  therefore,  very 
naturally,  held  a  unique  place   among  the  utter- 

125 


126  THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY. 

anccs  of  the  Lord.  It  has  been  held  to  be 
the  very  heart  of  Christ's  religion  as  a  law  of 
life.  Men  have  gone  so  far  as  to  say  that  all 
the  rest  counts  for  little,  so  this  be  left  us ; 
that  miracles  and  mysteries  —  even  the  Incar- 
nation, Crucifixion,  Resurrection,  and  Ascen- 
sion —  are  of  small  consequence,  so  that  men 
live  by  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount ;  that  so  wise 
are  its  words,  so  divine  are  its  principles,  that 
they  are  self-evident  moral  truths  which  need 
only  to  be  uttered  to  be  accepted,  and  therefore 
need  no  support  from  any  supernatural  authority. 

Now,  we  who  believe  in  the  Son  of  God,  and 
who  therefore  accept  mystery  and  miracle  as  the 
law  of  His  earthly  appearing,  yield  to  none  in 
our  lofty  estimate  of  these  words  so  new  and  won- 
derful, while  so  calmly  uttered  on  the  Judaean 
hillside. 

In  truth,  to  us  the  words  are  so  wonderful  that 
we  are  compelled  to  take  them  as  the  words  of 
God.  They  come  from  beyond.  They  are  the 
rules  of  living  in  the  eternal  kingdom  of  God 
in  heaven.  They  are  as  much  as  men  can  under- 
stand of  the  constitution  of  God's  moral  uni- 
verse, eternal  as  God  Himself,  some  shadow  of 
His  divine  nature ;  absolute  therefore,  and  neces- 
sary, whether  we  can  understand  or  not. 


THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY.  12/ 

Behind  the  gentleness  and  divine  reasonable- 
ness of  the  words,  sleep  thunders  more  awful 
than  the  thunders  of  Sinai.  The  law  there 
was  bare  command,  outwardly.  Here  on  the 
Mount  of  the  Beatitudes,  the  law  is  from  within 
the  veil.  Tables  of  stone  cannot  contain  it.  It 
is  a  law  living  and  aflame,  for  hearts  and  con- 
sciences, dividing  joints  and  marrow, — the  law 
that  preserves  the  inmost  heavens,  the  law  that, 
outraged,  burns  and  scorches  in  hell. 

So  awful,  as  well  as  so  beautiful,  are  the  words 
to  us,  that  we  hold  them  to  be  the  words  of  God. 
We  can  see  no  other  adequate  origin.  They  tran- 
scend all  human  experience.  They  are  no  out- 
growth of  hereditary  influence.  They  deliberately 
contradict,  to  all  appearances,  maxims  upon  which 
society  stands,  —  even  maxims  held  necessary 
for  its  own  preservation. 

All  theories  of  the  origin  ^of  morals  among 
men,  builded  in  smallest  degree  upon  the  needs 
of  society,  upon  the  survival  of  the  fittest  indi- 
vidual or  the  fittest  association  of  individuals ; 
all  theories  which  have  any  thing  to  say  of  heredi- 
tary impressions  growing  by  generations  into 
consideration  for  others,  as  well  as  the  theories 
founded  on  self-interest,  or  pleasure,  or  greatest 
good  to  the  greatest  number,  —  are  swept  away 


128  rilE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY. 

by  these  calm  words,  before  which  the  world  has 
stood  dazed,  and  yet  strangely  moved  and  influ- 
enced, since  they  were  uttered. 

For  we  can  imagine  a  morality  —  an  ethical 
code — growing  out  of  human  experience  and  the 
needs  of  men  living  in  association.  Whatever 
we  may  believe  to  be  its  root-origin  or  its  sanc- 
tions, we  can  imagine  it  thus  growing  amid  play 
of  opposing  forces,  and  the  give-and-take  of  the 
universal  struggle,  into  some  definite  system, 
better  or  worse.  And  the  worst  moral  system 
that  ever  existed  is  this  much  better  than  the 
moral  system  spun  out  of  their  own  theories  by 
some  of  our  philosophers :  that  it  does  not  con- 
demn men  for  a  breach  of  the  law  of  the  uni- 
verse, inasmuch  as  they  care  for  the  blind  and 
the  lame  and  the  leprous,  and  thus  make  the 
unfittest  survive,  and,  with  no  fear  of  the  law  of 
heredity  before  their  eyes,  build  asylums  for  the 
orphans  of  the  sickly  and  improvident,  and  even 
reformatories  for  the  children  of  criminals  ! 

The  point  is,  that  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount 
the  ethics  are,  at  first  view,  destructive  of  all 
society,  —  destructive,  indeed,  of  the  individual 
himself,  —  contradictory  of  every  principle  on 
which  it  has  been  thought  by  philosophers  to 
found  a  system  of  morals. 


THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY.  1 29 

So  with  all  its  sweetness  and  beauty,  and  with 
all  the  acceptance  it  has  received  from  believer 
and  unbeliever,  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  has 
stood  a  stumbling-block.  One  strange  thing  here 
also  is  this  :  that  whereas  there  was  instant  pro- 
test made  against  other  utterances  of  our  Lord 
as  hard  sayings,  which  no  man  could  receive,  here 
there  is  none.  Yet  these  other  hard  sayings  have 
been  explained  and  accepted,  while  no  man  has 
explained  and  no  man  accepted  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount. 

Do  not  imagine  I  so  far  mistake  myself  as  to 
think  I  can  explain  it.  I  desire  only  to  say  some 
things  concerning  it  which  have  helped  me  to  rec- 
oncile apparent  difficulties,  and  so  help  others,  — 
set  them  at  least  thinking  concerning  the  matter, 
whether  they  agree  with  me  or  not,  which  is  of 
the  least  possible  importance  in  any  case. 

For  the  fact  is  to  be  first  noted,  that  the  Ser- 
mon on  the  Mount  has  never  yet  been  lived  save 
by  Him  who  uttered  it.  I  dare  make  no  omission. 
No  apostle,  no  martyr,  no  doctor  or  father,  no 
Christian  man  of  any  period  or  of  any  name,  has 
ever  utterly  lived  by  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount. 

In  fact,  I  may  say  the  Sermon  has  never  been 
proclaimed  as  a  possible  code  of  life  at  all,  except 
by  its  Author.     It    seems,  in    large   measure,  to 


130  THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY. 

have  dropped  out  of  the  Christian  consciousness 
from  the  first,  if  it  ever  found  lodgement  there  at 
all.  Those  who  have  commented  upon  it  or  tried 
to  explain  it  have  explained  it  away.  They  do  so 
yet.  Hostile  critics  have  declared,  that,  carried 
out,  it  would  break  up  human  society.  Some 
fantastic  efforts  have  been  made,  at  times,  to  live 
by  its  declarations,  and  have  failed  utterly  under 
whatever  name.  Practical  people,  living  in  the 
world,  have,  whether  Christians  or  not,  agreed  to 
ignore  the  existence  of  a  great  deal  of  this  won-r 
derful  speech,  or  to  consider  it  as,  at  least,  not 
expected  to  be  lived. 

Non-resistance  to  evil,  turning  the  one  cheek 
when  the  other  is  smitten  ;  when  robbed  of  the 
coat,  to  surrender  the  cloak ;  compelled  to  do  a 
thankless  service,  to  do  the  double  ;  to  feel  bless- 
edness when  one  is  reviled  and  abused  cause- 
lessly, and  to  love  and  bless  the  abuser  and  the 
reviler,  —  this  is  a  part  of  the  teaching ;  and  we 
are  told  by  good  Christian  men  and  wise  men 
that  to  act  upon  this  teaching  would  turn  every 
organized  human  society  into  anarchy,  the  Church 
included ;  that  the  world  would  be  uninhabitable 
by  any  but  evil  men  ;  the  good  would  be  extin- 
guished from  its  face,  only  the  swinish  and  the 
ticrerish  left. 


THE  SEED    GROWING   SECRETLY.  I3I 

Of  course  the  Lord  could  not  have  contemplated 
a  result  like  this,  therefore  His  words  must  be 
capable  of  some  other  explanation  than  one  that 
would  involve  this.  There  is  evidently,  it  is  vir- 
tually said,  some  mistake  somewhere.  Resistance, 
resentment  against  injury,  swift  vengeance  upon 
the  wrong-doer,  either  by  the  one  injured  or  soci- 
ety acting  for  him,  is  essential  to  the  being  of  an 
ordered  life  upon  earth ;  and  our  Lord  could  never 
have  contradicted  the  plain  facts  of  human  life 
by  laying  down  propositions  destructive  as  these. 

But  the  difficulty  is  not  so  easily  removed.  In 
the  cases  where  not  the  letter,  but  the  spirit,  is 
in  the  mind  of  the  Teacher,  He  is  very  plain.  There 
seems  to  be  no  allegory  or  parable  here.  The 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  contains  plain  statements 
concerning  conduct,  and  they  all  stand  upon  the 
same  footing.  "  Give  to  him  that  asketh  thee, 
and  from  him  that  would  borrow  of  thee  turn  thou 
not  away,"  is  no  more  mystical,  is  uttered  in  no 
other  tone,  than  "  Whosoever  shall  put  away  his 
wife,  saving  for  the  cause  of  fornication,  causeth 
her  to  commit  adultery,"  or,  "  After  this  manner 
therefore  pray  ye." 

It  is  very  dangerous  to  make  distinctions  in 
the  words  of  the  Lord.  He  makes  none  in  this 
sermon    Himself.      All   is    uttered   in   the    same 


132  THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY. 

unruffled  calm  of  Divine  wisdom.  No  haste,  no 
passion,  here.  Precept  and  prayer  ahke  stand 
together;  and  these  things  are  taught,  that  "ye 
may  be  perfect,  even  as  your  Father  which  is 
in  heaven  is  perfect."  And  at  the  close  He  con- 
firms all  with  that  beautiful  and  awful  parable  of 
the  wise  man  who  heard  these  sayings,  and  did 
them,  and  so  built,  amid  the  floods  and  storms, 
his  house  upon  a  rock  ;  and  of  the  foolish  man 
who  heard,  and  did  not,  and  so  built  upon  the 
sand,  and  in  the  hour  of  tempest  and  rising  flood 
had  the  shelter  of  his  life  swept  away. 

Let  us  frankly  say,  then,  that  no  explanation 
which  weakens  or  obscures  the  words  can  be  a 
true  or  reverent  explanation.  It  is  possible  surely 
to  find  a  point  of  view  where  they  shall  retain 
their  force,  and  yet  be  words  possible  and  hopeful 
for  man. 

Remember,  then,  that  all  the  words  of  the  Lord 
are  seed-words.  He  Himself  is  the  sower  who 
went  forth  to  sow.  His  words  are  living  and  life- 
producing  germs.  They  are  germs  which  need  to 
grow,  which  are  sown  that  they  may  grow.  They 
demand  an  environment,  and  they  demand  time. 
Men's  words  are  generally  dead  formulas.  They 
have  usually  one  short  meaning,  and  the  utter- 
ance has  an  end.     Sometimes  even  to  men,  how- 


THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY.  1 33 

ever,  since  they  arc  in  the  image  of  God,  it 
comes  to  utter  words  of  power,  words  that  live 
and  grow  and  after  many  years  are  vital  and 
productive,  words  whose  full  meaning  only  time 
reveals. 

But  the  Lord's  words  are  such  in  infinite  meas- 
ure. They  are  not  formulas,  but  the  announce- 
ment of  principles.  They  are  not  words  only,  but 
things.  They  have  creative  power.  They  are 
germs  of  spiritual  forces.  "They  are  spirit,  and 
they  are  life."  We  err  if  we  imagine  that  one  age 
understands  them  or  one  meaning  exhausts  them. 
Eternal,  vital,  and  creative,  seeds  of  things,  they 
are  cast  into  the  seed-bed  of  the  world  and  time, 
to  grow  as  the  world  grows,  and  develop  as  time 
develops,  their  full  outcome  and  product  only  to 
be  hoped  and  dimly  guessed  afar  by  men  upon 
the  earth.  "  He  that  hath  ears  to  hear "  can 
gather  something,  however,  from  the  first,  though 
the  seed  grow  secretly,  and  the  green  blade  hath 
not  yet  burst  the  brown  mould. 

Many  words  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  let 
us  frankly  admit,  seem  to  us  impossible.  The 
day  of  their  power  has  not  come.  We  can  in  a 
degree  understand  the  situation  from  certain 
other  words  which  when  first  uttered  were  as 
strange  as  these,  but  which  to  us  now  are  words 


134  ^^^^  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY. 

of  power,  and  in  their  truth  self-evident  to  the 
Christian  conscience. 

Shall  we  confine  the  idea  of  a  development  in 
the  kingdom  of  God  only  to  its  outward  grov/th  ? 
Shall  we  say  the  mustard-seed  and  tree  refer  only 
to  the  visible  organization  ?  Can  we  say  that  of 
the  parable  of  the  leaven  ? 

Or  shall  we  extend  the  idea  to  the  development 
of  doctrine,  as  a  certain  class  of  Roman  theolo- 
gians do,  and  stop  tJicre  ? 

Is  there  not  also  a  development  in  ethics  ?  Is 
not  that  rather  the  development  referred  to,  the 
connection  of  the  words  considered,  when  our 
Lord  speaks  of  "first  the  blade,  then  the  ear, 
then  the  full  corn  in  the  ear "  ?  Is  it  not  the 
development  of  spiritual  insight  and  power  in 
"  the  kingdom  of  God  "  which  "  is  within  you  "  ? 

"  Blessed  are  the  peacemakers."  Consider 
where  those  words  were  spoken,  and  to  whom. 
Cast  out  from  the  great  Sower's  hand,  they  fell, 
a  seed  of  life  from  heaven,  upon  the  prepared 
or  unprepared  hearts  of  men. 

And,  looking  at  the  men  and  the  time,  one 
would  say,  of  all  the  seeds  sown  this  is  least  likely 
to  find  due  soil  for  growth. 

"Nay,"  said  the  Roman,  "the  word  has  no 
meaning.      Blessed   are  the  war-makers,  rather." 


THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY.  1 35 

His  whole  race-instinct,  his  hereditary  impulse, 
and  the  universal  sentiment  of  his  people,  revolted 
against  the  word.  Blessed  might  he  be,  indeed, 
v\rho  made  peace  as  the  result  of  war,  if  that 
peace  were  won  even  by  the  creation  of  a  desert ; 
but  the  blessing  came  not  from  the  peace,  but 
from  the  war  that  preceded  the  victory. 

The  most  blessed  man  in  all  the  world,  the 
man  who  trod  the  heights  of  life  and  time  in 
splendor,  was  the  impcrator  returned  from  victory, 
crowned  in  his  triumphal  car,  with  the  spoils  of 
conquered  provinces  behind  him,  and  the  captives 
at  his  chariot  -  wheels,  drawn  slowly  through 
Rome's  shouting  millions,  up  the  Sacred  Way, 
to  the  Capitol,  in  the  day  of  the  great  triumph. 

"Nay,  blessed  is  the  victor!  Honor,  thanks, 
triumph,  to  the  successful  war-makers  and  con- 
querors of  men  !  Woe  to  the  vanquished  !  Woe 
and  sorrow  to  the  weak  and  the  failing !  Happy 
are  the  strong,  and  thrice  happy  he  who  leads  the 
legions  to  war,  and  returns  for  the  laurel  crown 
and  the  Senate's  and  the  people's  thanks  ! " 

Here  was  the  Roman  sentiment ;  and  the 
Lord's  words  were  spoken  in  the  Roman  Empire, 
where,  after  all,  that  sentiment  was  predominant. 
But  was  it  not  Jewish  sentiment  as  well  t  Among 
the    Lord's    own   kin    were    the    war-makers    not 


136  THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY. 

blessed,  from  Joshua  the  son  of  Nun,  to  Judas 
Maccabaeus  ?  No  fiercer  soldiers  than  the  sons 
of  Jacob  ever  fought,  and  no  men  more  ready  to 
follow  and  honor,  and  count  thrice  blessed,  him 
who  should  make  successful  war  on  Rome,  drive 
the  legions  from  the  sacred  heritage,  and  set  up 
the  throne  of  the  warrior  David. 

And  yet  the  seed  fell  and  grew.  Among 
Romans,  as  among  Jews,  it  grew.  The  strange, 
heavenly  -  sounding  word  fell  gently  upon  the 
wrathful  voices  ot  a  hateful  and  warring  world, 
and  the  sound  was  not  lost  in  all  the  fierce 
discordancy  of  human   strife. 

The  years  pass  on.  The  seed-word  germinates. 
In  the  dark  it  grows  strong.  And  now  the  chil- 
dren of  a  race  more  warlike  than  the  Roman  at 
its  fiercest,  the  children  of  the  men  that  con- 
quered Rome  and  drank  the  joy  of  battle  as  the 
wine  of  life,  these  children,  no  less  warlike  than 
their  fathers,  a  brigade  of  whom  could  scatter 
like  chaff  the  best  army  ever  led  by  Caesar,  these 
children  say,  "  Yea,  blessed  are  the  peacemakers. 
They  are  the  children  of  God." 

The  greatest  soldier  of  the  century  —  "  the 
great  world- victor's  victor" — said,  "There  is 
nothing  so  dreadful  as  a  great  victory,  except  a 
great  defeat." 


THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY.  1 37 

And  the  greatest  soldier  of  our  own  land  said, 
"I  never  wish  again  to  see  even  a  single  regi- 
ment under  arms  for  battle." 

So  that  seed -word  sown  upon  the  mountain- 
side fell  into  the  world's  forbidding  furrows,  and, 
covered  by  the  rough  clods  of  trampled  battle- 
fields, germinated  even  so,  and  grew.  And  now 
all  Christian  men  accept  it  as  a  truth  self-evident, 
an  unassailable  principle  of  action,  an  eternal 
law  of  the  kingdom  of  God. 

Here  is  another  seed-word  of  the  great  Sower : 
"  Ye  know  that  the  princes  of  the  Gentiles  exer- 
cise dominion  over  them,  and  they  that  are  great 
exercise  authority  upon  them.  But  it  shall  not 
be  so  among  you  ;  but  whosoever  will  be  great 
among  you,  let  him  be  your  minister,  and  whoso- 
ever will  be  chief  among  you,  let  him  be  your 
servant." 

It  is  hard  for  us  now  fully  to  understand  the 
idea  of  kingship  or  sovereignty  when  these  words 
were  spoken.  It  was  entirely  irresponsible  in  its 
highest  conception.  The  great  Oriental  despot- 
isms were  governed  as  if  existing  for  one  man's 
pleasure,  or  one  man's  glory.  Only  in  Israel,  as 
far  as  we  can  see,  had  there  been  the  sense  that 
a  king  was  responsible ;  and  it  was  a  sense  only 
kept  alive  by  all  the  prophets   and  all  the  judg- 


158        THE  sEEjy  croin.vc  sf:cxE7zr, 

Debits  of  God.  Oiherwi>e.  kingsliip  and  auth<M-- 
jry  -irere  held  as  rciviie  rrcperr)-  for  the  giory 
zziC  ^^JHiieur  .11:  i  r'eisure  o:  the  owner.  He 
graiif.ed  his  irsare  desire  for  p?wer.  or  his  brutal 
Irs*  i:^r  senssal  pieasone,  wiih  ed  sense  ot  i^spon- 
sfDiiirr  ro  lie  gods  or  to  men.  Types  sarrhing 
hare  come  to  is  in  socoe  o£  the  modeTn  rajahs  oC 
IwBa  22?^  ™  t*?e  knig  of  Dahooi^. 

-  ze  -  t^perars  nnported  the  trpe   mto 


Ls   1^  purpose  and  meaning  of  his  t 

He     S2I     upon     the     wcffild's     hi^h 

-:cs,    with    abject    millaons    leader    his    feet, 

-    -  r  —  rht  hx  tbeir  n»eans  pursue  his  own 

i   hare   bis   bmtal   vill  in  sjMte   of 

A  fng^htf^  :  on  the  eaith,  this  Hialmlir 

.1  :Tii>e  idea  of  leadeishq>  and 

"   '  :?  in  tnuT^  red,  as  oi 

_  -  _:e5  oi  ali  history,  and 

1  ve  it  sol     There  was  no 

.  Asia,  «■  Africa,  we 

A-  It.-.  _  la  fall  into  soch  a 


THE  SEED    GROWnVG  SECRETLY.  1 39 

world  Who  could  receive  it  ?  It  must  lie  for 
centuries  slowly  germinating  in  a  world  red  by 
wars,  darkened  by  t\Tannies,  groaning  under 
cruelty,  or  dumb  with  despair,  under  the  brutes 
that  trampled  its  millions  down.  Who  of  all 
that  heard  that  word  could  have  received  it  as 
the  law  of  man's  government,  because  it  is  the 
eternal  law  of  God's? 

Society,  as  men  then  understood  it,  would  be 
broken  up  in  the  attempt  to  rule  on  such  princi- 
ple. Even  the  apostles  themselves  had  no  under- 
standing of  the  principle.  Taey,  too,  dreamed  of 
thrones  and  dominions  for  their  own  aggrandize- 
ment in  the  very  kingdom  of  heaven.  High- 
seated,  with  feet  upon  the  necks  of  prostrate 
men,  —  this  was,  up  to  this  moment,  their  notion 
of  the  high  places  Christ  promised.  Not  till  He 
died  that  men  might  live,  not  till  the  cross  be- 
came his  throne,  and  the  crown  of  thorns  his 
diadem,  and  his  own  blood  his  coronation  purple, 
did  they  understand  the  infinite  sweep  of  that 
law  so  passionlessly  uttered  by  the  Master.  And 
it  has  been  a  hard  thing  to  learn.  All  things 
were  against  it.  The  existing  state  of  things 
gave  no  welcome  to  the  germ-thought,  nor 
would  any  existing  state  of  things  for  ages  to 
come.      The   seed  was    buried   out   of  si-:ht  and 


I40  THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY. 

out  of  knowledge,  among  civilized  and  barbarian, 
Christian  and  heathen,  equally. 

But  divine  germs  do  not  die.  In  due  time  the 
tiny  shoot  breaks  the  stained  and  trampled  sod. 
It  grows  in  storms,  roots  itself  in  a  rocking  world. 
And  to-day,  after  eighteen  hundred  years,  all 
Christian  men  acknowledge  that  the  Lord  in  that 
utterance  laid  down  the  fundamental  organic  law 
of  human  society. 

A-uthority  exists  not  for  the  benefit  of  him  who 
exercises  it,  but  for  the  benefit  of  those  upon 
whom  it  is  exercised.  The  high  place  is  no  pri- 
vate possession.  It  exists  that  high  service  may 
be  done.  Its  height  is  a  vantage  from  which  to 
work  for  those  below.  Only  by  the  work  done 
does  any  man  hold  title  to  the  place.  Excep- 
tional in  power,  genius,  leadership,  foresight,  he 
is  sternly  held  to  strict  accountability.  Under 
penalties,  he  must  not  use  these  great  gifts  for  his 
own  glory  or  his  own  pleasure.  They  are  trusts 
to  be  used  in  human  service.  And  the  man  most 
wonderfully  endowed,  and  sitting  on  the  necks  of 
kings,  as  our  own  century  has  given  us  instance, 
is  hurled  from  his  high  place  and  swept  from  all 
his  greatness  by  an  indignant  human  sentiment 
when  he  uses  the  great  gifts  and  the  great  place 
for  his  own  service  and  not  the  service  of  men. 


THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY.  I4I 

So  has  that  little  seed-word  dropped  in  Palestine 
grown,  that  it  is  a  self-evident  statement  of  fun- 
damental truth.  Our  civilization  stands  upon  it, 
all  our  constitutions,  all  the  order  of  our  settled 
government,  all  our  political  freedom. 

Whether  in  our  own  Republic  or  in  the  consti- 
tutional sovereignty  of  the  mother-land,  whether 
it  be  president,  king,  queen,  or  emperor,  whatso- 
ever the  form,  the  law  lies  below  the  same,  — 
"  Whosoever  will  be  chief  among  you,  let  him  be 
your  servant." 

Our  own  chief  magistrate  puts  the  principle  in 
political  phrase,  but  the  same  principle  neverthe- 
less,—  "Public  office  is  a  public  trust."  And 
the  greatest  emperor  of  the  age  lies  under  the 
rain  of  his  people's  tears,  his  long  life  one  un- 
broken witness  to  the  principle  that  he  and  his 
were  to  wear  the  crown  because  no  man  in  Ger- 
many toiled  as  the  emperor  toiled,  and  that  day 
and  night,  from  youth  to  ninety  years,  he  was  the 
servant  of  his  people,  and  therefore  their  greatest. 
So  we  find  some  germs  of  the  Master-Sower  have 
grown. 

Shall  we  despair  of  others  of  which  we  see  no 
movement  yet,  no  stirrings  in  the  dark  furrows  of 
the  world }  Shall  we  say,  because  they  have  not 
shown  green   above  the  clods  yet,  that  they  are 


142  THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY. 

not  living  seeds  at  all,  or  that  the  Lord's  action  is 
misunderstood,  and  He  did  not  sow  them  ? 

I  prefer  to  believe  we  have  here  examples  of 
the  condition  and  of  the  law  of  growth.  The 
time  is  not  ripe.  But  the  seed  is  not  dead. 
"The  word  of  the  Lord  endureth  forever."  "In 
the  heavens  "  at  least  it  liveth,  and  the  heavenly 
germs  sown  on  earth  have  that  eternal  life,  and 
wait  their  resurrection. 

"  I  say  unto  you,  that  ye  resist  not  evil." 
"  Whosoever  shall  smite  thee  on  thy  right  cheek, 
turn  to  him  the  other  also." 

They  are  hard  sayings,  we  confess.  Who  can 
hear  them  }  But  they  are  no  harder  sayings  to  us 
than  other  sayings,  in  whose  divine  light  and 
gentle  human  truth  we  now  delight  ourselves, 
once  were  to  our  fathers. 

I  think,  even  now,  one  can  see  some  stirrings 
in  the  dead  dust  that  covers  them.  The  world 
grows  a  gentler  rule.  Revenge  has  taken  up  its 
dwelling  among  savages  and  half-savages.  There 
is  consideration  for  the  meek,  there  is  room  in  a 
selfish  world  for  the  poor  in  spirit,  for  the  un- 
aggressive, the  non-resisting,  the  weak. 

The  cry  of  "  Vac  victis  !  "  is  heard  on  no  battle- 
field longer :  nations  take  no  vengeance.  The 
conquered    are   lifted  from  among  the  trampling 


THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY.  1 43 

horse-hoofs,  and  the  red  cross  of  relief  is  aUke 
sacred  to  contending  hosts. 

It  is  yet  a  wild,  half-savage  world,  full  of 
cruelty  and  unreason  and  brutality.  But  the 
clouds  are  lifting.  I  believe  no  man  need  fail  to 
see  the  promise  of  the  coming  day.  More  and 
more  the  kingdom  of  the  Child  grows  mighty. 
More  and  more  the  power  of  love  and  gentleness 
reveals  itself.  More  and  more  revenge  and  wrath 
and  hatred  are  hiding  in  the  pit  whence  they 
came  ;  and  more  and  more  pity,  forgiveness,  gen- 
tleness, and  love  are  seen  to  be  human,  as  we 
have  so  long  preached  them  to  be  divine. 

I  can  believe  the  hour  is  coming  when  men  will 
accept  the  Lord's  law  of  forgiveness  as  a  self-evi- 
dent spiritual  statement,  as  they  have  accepted 
others  I  have  named.  It  surely  is  the  eternal  law 
of  the  kingdom  of  God,  the  law  on  which,  to  the 
very  letter,  He  Himself  lived  and  died  for  our 
salvation.  Being  so,  it  shall  some  day  surely  be 
the  visible  and  universally  accepted  law  for  men. 
They  may  be  slow  to  act  upon  it,  after  its  ac- 
knowledgment, as  they  have  been  slow  upon 
others.  Deeds  will  fall  far  short  of  professions, 
and  many  failures  will  obstruct.  But  that  the 
day  will  come  when  the  unprovoked  wrong-doer 
will  be  looked  upon  somewhat  as  a  madman  or  an 


144  THE  SEED    GROWING  SECRETLY. 

idiot  is  looked  on  now,  I  doubt  not ;  when  men 
will  stand  shocked  and  amazed  at  the  smiter  upon 
the  right  cheek,  as  upon  some  strange  monstrosity 
of  human  nature,  who  must  be  kept  in  safety, 
examined,  pitied,  cured,  and  made  human  if  it  be 
possible,  I  doubt  not.  The  world  has  seen 
growths  as  strange  as  this  ! 

P""or  we  Christians  are  still  the  prisoners  of 
hope.  God's  kingdom  rules  the  future.  We  wait 
with  patience.  The  kingdom  cometh  not  with 
observation. 

Our  hope  justifies  our  attitude.  Christ's  religion 
has  not  failed.  After  eighteen  hundred  years  we 
are  not  shaken  when  men  tell  us  "there  has 
never  yet  been  a  Christian  according  to  Christ's 
measure.  No  church,  sect,  or  party  has  ever 
dared  to  lay  down  His  plain  law,  and  demand  lives 
measured  by  it.  And  if  He  Himself  should  come 
and  live,  as  He  lived  in  Judxa,  there  is  not  a 
Christian  community  in  which  He  would  not  be 
seized  and  restrained  as  an  outcast  or  insane." 

I  say  we  are  not  shaken,  because  we  sec  the 
Lord  put  His  kingdom  into  the  world  subject  to 
what  we  call  natural  laws,  that  is,  subject  to  the 
way  of  His  own  order  and  working  in  the  world. 
So  He  Himself  declares.  I  have  no  right  in  rea- 
son   or   Scripture    to   expect   it   otherwise.     The 


THE  SEED   GROWING  SECRETLY.  1 45 

growth  IS  slow.  Its  slowness  was  foretold.  It 
awaits  the  procession  of  the  years,  the  words  and 
works  and  thoughts  of  men.  But  there  is 
growth,  development,  and  I  can  see  them  with 
my  eyes.  "First  the  blade."  It  is  possibly  only 
blade-time  yet.  Certainly  it  is  not  the  time  of 
the  full  corn.  But  the  blade  is  full  earnest  of  the 
bending  ears  of  the  harvest. 

And  if  God  can  wait,  we  can  wait.  Still  from 
the  lips  of  His  Church  will  fall  the  words  that 
find  no  ears  that  can  hear.  Still  half  our  preach- 
ing is  of  things  half  understood,  not  believed, 
certainly  not  lived.  Still  the  voice  cries  in  the 
wilderness,  and  only  its  own  echo  comes  back. 

But  we  have  the  sure  promise  of  the  Master, 
and  can  confirm  our  wavering  faith  by  past  expe- 
rience, that  His  Word  shall  endure  forever,  and 
that,  some  day,  every  utterance  of  the  Eternal 
Word  shall  stand  upon  the  earth  and  before  the 
eyes  of  men  confessed  a  living  word  of  power,  a 
law  of  the  eternal  kingdom  of  God  in  heaven 
and  in  earth  alike. 


^artsl)  lectures 

ON  THE 

By  WM.  a.  SNIVELY,   D.D. 

260  Pages. 
Cloth  Binding 
Price  $1.25. 

From  the  Presiding  Bishop. 
Dr.  Snively's    "Parish  Lectures  on  the  Prayer  Book "  seem  to  me 
admirably  adapted  for  the  purpose  for  which  they  were  written.     They 
are  simple,  clear  and  to  the  point. 

They  are  certainly  an  excellent  help  in  that  duty  which  is  by  canon 
laid  upon  "ministers  of  this  Church,  who  have  charge  of  parishes 
or  cures,"  that  they  be  "  diligent  in  informing  the  youth  and  others  in 
the  Doctrine,  Constitution,  History  and  Liturgy  of  the  Church."' 

Very  truly  yours,  J.  WILLIAMS. 

From   "  The  Churchman.^' 

As  these  lectures  are  for  parish  use,  they  do  not  enter  upon  doubtful 
or  disputed  topics.  They  are  eminently  conservative,  but  they  are  well 
guarded  from  the  danger  which  might  easily  follow  of  being  common- 
place. 

There  is  a  clearness  and  directness  of  style  which  makes  their  pres- 
entation of  even  the  most  obvious  truths  regarding  the  Prayer  Book  in- 
teresting and  felicitous. 

This  volume  seems  to  us  to  be  admirably  adapted  for  the  use  of 
those  who  are  desirous  to  know  more  about  the  Church  services  than 
mere  acquaintanceship  with  their  customary  order  can  give. 

There  are  many  more  people  than  one  commonly  supposes,  who 
would  gladly  know  more  about  the  Prayer  Book  than  they  do,  and  yet 
are  diffident  about  asking. 

We  find  that  Dr.  Snively's  book  fills  this  important  place,  and  we 
are  glad  to  call  our  readers'  attention  to  it. 

From  ^^The  Brooklyn  Daily  Eagle." 
"Parish  Lectures  on  the  Prayer  Book"  is  one  of  the  most  sumptuous 
looking  religious  publications  of  the  season.     It  is  from  the  "  DeVinne 
Press." 

THOMAS  WHITTAKERJ  2  and  3  BMe  House, 

Publisher,  [  New  York. 


Stbtng  Voices 


OF 


2,tbmg  0ltn. 


Practical  Sermons  by  Bishops  and  other  Clergy  of  the 
Church,  intended  for  Family  and  Lay  reading. 

256  Pages,  i2mo. 
Cloth  Binding. 
Price  $1.25. 


They  are  what  most  of  us  desire  such  productions  to  be — plain,  prac- 
tical and  brief. — Mail  and  Express. 

We  observe  no  extravagance  or  straining  for  effect,  yet  in  every  case 
the  tone  is  devout  and  practical,  and  the  volume  is  adapted  to  do  great 
good. — N.   V.  Observer, 

There  is  no  need  of  an  extended  criticism  of  this  volume,  the  title 
and  table  of  contents  speak  for  themselves.  We  are  sure  that  no  com- 
mendation of  ours  is  needed  to  increase  the  sale  of  this  timely  and  valua- 
ble collection  of  sermons. —  The  Churchman. 

The  preface  from  the  graceful  pen  of  Dr.  Cushman  excites  the  desire 
to  read  the  sermons,  and  the  desire  grows  by  what  it  feeds  upon.  Here 
are  sermons  by  men  whom  we  know  and  admire,  who  are  eminent  in  the 
teaching  office.  It  was  a  happy  thought  of  Mr.  Whittaker  to  publish  this 
volume,  and  we  cordially  join  the  hope  expressed  in  the  preface  that  it 
will  meet  with  such  a  welcome  as  to  justify  not  only  a  second,  but  an  an- 
nual volume  of  like  character. — Living  Church, 

The  whole  spirit  and  purpose  of  the  discourses  is  the  inculcation  of 
such  practical  truths  as  are  of  every-day  need  in  this  busy,  vexing,  per- 
verse, distracting  world,  to  uplift,  to  cheer,  to  strengthen  and  to  inspire. 
The  love  of  Christ  (subjective  and  objective)  is  the  key-note  of  the  vol- 
ume, and  from  this  come  strains  that  tell  us  of  content,  purity,  work,  hab- 
its, friends,  temptations,  worldliness,  decision,  and  paradise. —  The  Critic. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 

Publisher, 


2  and  3  Bible  House, 

New  York. 

(OVER.) 


3 

Prebendary  Row  07i  Eternal  Punishment. 


pUTURE     RETRIBUTION, 

Viewed  in  the  Light  of  Reason  and  Revelation. 
By 

THE  REV.  C.  A.  ROW,  M.A. 


Octavo,    Cloth    binding.      Price,    $2.50. 


"A  very  valuable  book  which  will  bring  out  in  a  very  strong 
light  to  all  careful  readers,  the  remarkable  discrepancy  between  the 
reticence  of  Scripture,  and  the  confidence  with  which  ecclesiasti- 
cal literature  has  treated  the  subject,  .  .  .  We  feel  very  thank- 
ful to  Mr.  Row  for  stating  the  question  plainly,  and  making  its  direct 
bearing  on  our  faith  in  the  justice  of  God,  as  clear  as  he  does." — 
Spectator. 

"  Every  reasonable  Christian  would  be  a  gainer  by  reading 
this  book." — Daily  Telegraph. 

"  Mr.  Row's  style  and  manner  is  just  what  it  ought  to  be — 
plain,  calm,  and  dignified,  like  the  great  Church  of  which  he  is  a 
Canon.  Such  books  as  this  meet  a  grave  want  of  the  day  in  a 
manner  calculated  to  deepen  alike  its  reverence  and  its  rectitude." 
— Pall  Mall  Gazette. 

"  This  is  certainly  one  of  the  most  important  contributions 
ever  made  to  the  study  of  Christian  Eschatology.  ...  It  has 
a  fulness  of  systematic  treatment  which  belongs  to  no  previous 
treatise  on  the  subject." — Church  Bells. 

"An  earnest,  skilful,  and  interesting  book." — The  Critic. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        <•        New  York, 


4 

The  Late  Bishop  of  Ely's  Sermons. 


Sermons   on   Subjects    from    the    Old 
Testament. 

Sermons   on   Subjects  from  the   New 
Testament. 


By  JAMES  RUSSELL  WOODFORD,  D.D., 

Sometime  Lord  Bishop  of  Ely. 
EDITED   BY 

HERBERT    MORTIMER    LUCKOCK,     D.  D., 

Author  of  "  After  Death,"  Etc. 


2  Volumes,  i2mo,  Cloth.      Price,  $2.50. 


"  It  is  the  reality  of  faith  which  gives  to  the  words  of  the  preacher  their 
living  effect,  and  this  reality  was  one  of  the  ingredients  in  James  Russell 
Woodford's  oratorical  power.  His  renown,  as  a  preacher,  was  not  the  result 
of  place  or  position.  *  *  *  Another  qualification  which  is  conspicuous  in 
these  Sermons  is  the  unpolemical  character  of  his  mind.  His  mode  of  meeting 
eiror  was  by  confronting  it  by  positive  and  d'jgmatic  teaching  of  tlie  truth. 
He  rather  left  the  truth  to  speak  for  itself  instead  of  wrangling  with  an  oppo- 
nent. And  a  third  quality,  which  is  essential  in  a  preacher,  is  that  of 
sympathy.  This  was  a  marked  feature  of  the  character  of  Dr.  Woodford,  and 
may  be  traced  in  both  these  volumes.  It  was  a  sympathy  which  arose  from 
self-forgetfulness  and  was  not  merely  the  cx[ire>sioa  of  an  emotional  nature." 
*  *  *  These  volumes  form  a  solid  coiuribuliou  to  the  homiletic  literature 
of  our  Church. —  The  Literary  Churchman. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        -        New  York. 


TWO  WORKS  FOR  BIBLE 
READERS. 


A  Handbook  of  Biblical  Difficulties ;  or,  Reasonable  Solu- 
tions of  Perplexing  Things  in  Sacred  Scripture.  Edited  by 
Rev.  Robert  Tuck,  B.A.  With  ample  indexes.  568  pages. 
8vo,  cloth,  $2.50. 

"  This  book,  we  think,  will  prove  very  helpful  to  many  minds. 
Ours  is  a  sceptical  age.  Never  before  has  the  Bible  had  to  meet 
so  many  and  such  fierce  assaults.  It  has  been  attacked  by  the 
critic,  the  scientist,  the  historian,  and  the  moralist.  Its  difificulties 
have  been  exaggerated  and  its  meanings  misrepresented.  Objec- 
tions are  brought  against  it  everywhere,  among  the  working  as 
well  as  among  cultured  scholars.  And  what  we  need  is  a  fair 
reasonable  reply  to  these  objections  ;  a  satisfactory  explanation  of 
the  difficulties  which  every  thoughtful  mind  encounters  in  reading 
the  Bible.  This  is  furnished  us,  to  a  large  extent,  in  the  book  be- 
fore us.  It  is  the  work  of  a  calm,  judicious  scholar,  who  seems  to 
know  just  what  is  required  by  perplexed  minds  at  the  present 
time.  It  is  characterised  throughout  by  good  sense,  avoiding  on 
the  one  hand  the  manufacturer  of  difficulties,  and  not  shrinking, 
on  the  other,  from  such  as  are  real." — The  Church  Press. 

Echoes  of  Bible  History.  By  W.  Pakenham  Walsh,  D.D., 
Bishop  of  Ossory.  With  fifty  illustrations.  i2mo,  cloth, 
S1.50. 

"  It  is  a  valuable  work,  and  we  do  not  know  where  so  much 
knowledge  can  be  obtained  concerning  recent  discoveries,  in  so 
small  a  compass." — Churchman. 

"Very  little  that  has  occurred  in  the  annals  of  Bibliml 
Archaeology  during  the  last  half  century  is  here  omitted." — Tlie 
Critic. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,       -       -       New  York. 


Sermons    Preached  to    Harrow    Boys 

In  the  Years   1885  and  1886. 

By  REV.  J.  E.  C.  WELLDON,  M.A., 

Head  Master  of  Harrow  School. 


12a3Q.o,  Clo-b3=L.    IParxce,  S1-50. 


"This  is  a  very  interesting  and  admirable  series  of  Sermons.  Mr.  Welldon 
seems  thoroughly  to  understand  a  boy  audience.  He  puts  his  mind  fairly  to 
theirs,  shows  them  his  own  familiarity  and  sympathy  with  school  life,  uses  the 
illustrations  and  relates  the  anecdotes  that  will  tell  best  with  them.  As  a  rule 
the  sermons  that  will  tell  with  the  boys  are  alsovery  useful  for  children  of  larger 
growth.  It  used  to  be  said  of  Macaulay  that  he  wrote  like  a  schoolboy,  and 
both  schoolboys  and  men  are  voracious  readers  of  his  volumes.  It  would  as 
well  that  the  fathers  of  the  Harrow  boys  should  read  these  sermons  as  well  as 
the  boys  themselves.  The  list  of  the  subjects  is  singularly  attractive,  for  in- 
deed Mr.  Welldon  seems  extremely  well  en  rapport  with  the  subjects  of  discus- 
sion that  are  at  present  uppermost,  and  indeed  will  always  be  uppermost,  less  or 
more,  to  thoughtful  minds." — The  Literary  World,  London. 


The  Bird's  Nest  and  Other  Sermons 

For  Children  of  all  Ages. 

By  THE  REV.  SAMUEL  COX,  D.D. 

Late  Editor  of  "The  Expositor." 


ISom-O,    clo-bli-      Far±c©,    ^1.50. 


"An  excellance  should  be  noted  as  pervading  the  volume  :  The  absence 
of  false  sentimentality  and  the  presentation  of  motives  that  tend  to  foster  a 
sturdy,  thoughtful,  earnest  Christian  life  in  the  boys  and  girls.  Children  need 
such  motives,  and,  in  fact,  they  prefer  to  listen  to  discourses  which  make  such 
appeals.  They  are  far  less  easily  deceived  by  clap-traps  and  tawdry  sentiment 
than  many  older  people.  For  this  reason  the  expository  method  set-ms  especially 
flitted  to  interest  as  well  as  instruct  them.  T/ie  volume  7vill  SHgs;est  io  many 
pastors  the  correct  vie-w  of  preaching  to  children  "^T he  Sunday  School  Times. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -       -        New  York. 


7 

THE  GROWTH  OF  CHURCH 
INSTITUTIONS. 

By  THE  REV.  EDWIN  HATCH,  D,D,, 

Author  of   Bampton   Lectures  on  the    "Organization  of  the  Early  Christian 

Churches." 

i2mo,  cloth,  $1.50. 

"  Dr.  Hatch  places  himself  upon  the  ground  of  an  original  investigator.  He  borrows  little 
from  previous  explorers  ;  he  treads  in  the  steps  of  no  other  student ;  he  collects  facts  with  un- 
tiring assiduity,  and  draws  his  conclusions  with  bold  and  serene  independence." — The  New 
York  Independent. 

"We  are  struck,  as  we  read,  by  the  dispassionateness  of  the  present  writer,  his  aim  to  be 
not  controversial  but  simply  historical  being  evident  on  every  page." —  The  Living  Church. 

"  It  will  be  read  of  necessity  by  every  bright  divinity  student  and  certainly  by  every 
thinking  clergyman  in  the  United  States  within  the  year,  and  will  do  more  to  put  our  eccles- 
iastical matters  upon  a  secure  and  sensible  footing  than  any  other  work  of  its  kind,  always 
excepting  its  precursor  in  the  Bampton  Lectures  of  the  same  author,  that  has  appeared  in 
English  during  the  present  century." — The  Boston  Herald. 


Dr.  Cheyne's  New  Work. 

JOB  AND  SOLOMON, 

Or  the  Wisdom  of  the  Old  Testament. 
By  THE  REV.  T.  K.  CHEYNE,  M.A ,  D.D., 

Oral  Professor  of  Interpretation  at  Oxford.     Author  of  "  A  Commentary  on  the 
Prophecies  of  Isaiah,"  etc. 

8vo,  cloth,  $2.25. 

"Professor  Cheyne  is  one  of  the  leaders  in  that  English  school  of  Biblical  Criticism  which 
unites  with  the  thoroughness  and  fearlessness  of  the  Germans,  candor,  good  judgment,  and 
reverential  spirit  peculiarly  its  own.  In  the  present  volumes  he  treats  from  the  critical  stand- 
point the  books  of  Job,  Proverbs,  Ecclesiastes  and  Ecclesiasticus  ;  and  the  preface  holds  out  a 
hope,  which  we  trust  may  be  realized,  that  in  a  future  volume  Psalms.  Lamentations,  and  the 
'  Song  of  Songs  '  may  be  similarly  discussed.  Such  books  are  a  boon  to  educated  Christians, 
putting  within  their  reach,  in  not  too  abtruse  or  bulky  form,  the  results  of  modern  scholarship 
and  inquiry.  If  they  combat  on  the  one  hand,  many  received  traditional  notions,  they  give, 
on  the  other  hand,  much  more  than  they  take  away,  imparting  fresh  interest  and  value  to  many 
passages  which  are  in  general  reverentially  '  skipped'  as  mysteriously  obscure,  or  used  as  arse- 
nals of  texts,  to  be  taken  out  singly  and  fearfully  misapplied  in  the  service  of  dogmatic  theol- 
ogy,"—CAr/f^/««  Union, 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        -        New  York. 


Two  Books  for  the  Times. 


The  Vine  Out  of  Egypt.  By  Rev.  Wm.  Wilberforce  New- 
ton, Rector  of  St.  Paul's  Church,  Pittsfield,  Mass.  12 mo, 
paper  covers.     Price,  50  cents. 

The  volume  is  a  history  of  the  growth  and  development  of  the  Episcopal 
Church  in  America  with  especial  reference  to  the  church  life  of  the  future. 
The  author  gives  a  history  of  the  movement  towards  federated  unity  which 
resulted  in  the  formation  of  the  congress  of  churches.  The  last  chapter  is  an 
appeal  to  the  cluirch  not  to  risk  is  leadership  by  the  perilous  policy  of  a  change 
of  name.  The  volume  will  undoubtedly  create  quite  an  interest  among  the 
thinkers  of  the  day,  and  its  advent  is  awaited  with  eagerness. 

Protestant  Episcopal  Church  Doctrine  and  Church 
Unity.  By  the  Rev.  C.  M.  Butler,  D.D.,  Late  Prof,  in 
the  Divinity  School,  West  Philadelphia.  i6mo,  cloth,  60 
cents  ;  paper,  25  cents. 

From  The  Church. — "The  book  is  eminently  worthy  of  perusal,  and  a 
careful  perusal,  by  men  of  every  school  of  thought  in  our  Church.  The  author 
brings  to  the  subjects  of  which  he  treats  a  fair  and  open  mind,  as  well  as  a 
mind  fully  instructed  in  that  particular  department  of  ecclesiastical  knowledge. 
.  .  .  The  question  is  a  most  important  one  always,  and  a  superlatively  im- 
portant one  just  now :  What  is  the  position  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church,  doctrinally  considered,  as  defined  by  herself?  This  question  Dr. 
Butler  undertakes  to  answer,  gathering  his  answer  from  the  Prayer  Book,  from 
its  'Offices'  and  'Articles.'  What  is  the  position  of  our  Church  in  her 
teaching  concerning  the  Church  Catholic  and  her  own  relation  to  it ;  what  con- 
cerning the  Episcopacy  ;  what  concerning  the  Sacraments  ;  and  how  do  all 
these  bear  upon  the  subject  of  Church  Unity,  now  so  prominently  brought  before 
us  by  the  action  of  the  House  of  Bishops  in  the  late  General  Convention  ? 
These  are  vital  subjects,  and  in  this  book  are  handled  in  a  masterly  way,  with 
ample  knowledge  and  a  strict  logical  acumen.  .  .  .  We  would  be  glad  to 
see  such  a  book  widely  distributed  and  published  in  such  a  form  as  would  make 
its  widest  distribution  feasible.  Benjamin  Watson." 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        -        New  York. 


9 

Reduced  in  Price  from  %2.oo  to  $/.6><9,  7iet. 


RELIGION; 

A    Revelation    and   a    Rule   of    Life. 

SERMONS  AND  ESSAYS  — 

By  THE  REV.  WILLIAM  KIRKUS,  M.A.,  LLB. 


i2mo,  cloth,  uncut,  $i.oo.     Net. 


From  The  Churchman.  — "  Mr.  Kirkus  is  so  well  known  not  only  as  an  elo. 
quent  and  stirring  preacher,  but  also  as  one  of  our  ablest  and  clearest  writers, 
and  the  present  volume  thoroughly  sustains  his  well-deservtd  reputation.  The 
reader  is  so  carried  on  by  his  glowing,  inconventional  style,  and  by  a  freshness 
of  tone  and  freedom  of  touch  rarely  found  in  sermons,  that  he  is  sure  to  be  in- 
terested even  if  he  cannot  always  agree.  .  .  .  Sermons  like  these  ought  to 
be  in  the  libraries  of  every  clergyman  in  the  country.'" 

From  The  Christian  World,  London. — "  It  is  a  living,  thoughtful  and 
powerful  exhibition  of  the  writer's  best  intellectual  and  religious  convictions, 
which  will  be  cordially  welcomed  by  his  old  friends  and  admirers." 

From  The  Church  Record. — "  It  is  refreshing  in  these  days  of  loose  think- 
ing and  careless  speaking,  when  sentimental  fancies  are  substituted  on  account 
of  their  novel  beauty  for  the  verities  of  the  olden  faith,  to  take  up  a  book  so 
strong,  vigorous,  and  scholarly  as  the  one  before  us.  The  writer,  whose  keen, 
critical  insight  and  power  of  separating  the  wheat  from  the  chaff,  are  wtll 
known  to  thinkers  in  the  Church,  has  herewith  given  us  a  volume  that  will  bear 
reading,  and  repeated  reading,  and  both  furnish  abundance  of  digested  thoughts 
and  be  fruitful  in  stimulating  thoughts  in  others." 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        -        New  York. 


RECENT  SECCESSFL'L  BOOKS 


Records  of  an  Active  Life.    By  Hemax  Dyer,  D.D.    8vo, 

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I  I      Is:;  3 :  .Alabama.     With  five  ponri.::;.     8to,  cloth. 


nark  the  5tr~r  ~-~.  aad  diis 
of  the      r.rzt-:  T:         —     •:  Cimrri 


Liturgies  =r.  1  j.Tices  of  the  Church.  For  the  use  of 
En;  in  Dlastration  of  the  Book  of  Common 

Praver.     ^.1^      -?r  BcTtBiDGE,  M.A.     i2mo,  cloth,  ^.50. 

Ecdesii  Ar.z'.:z^~.^  .\  H-stoiy  of  the  Church  of  Christ  in 
E--.      ,  1     1  est    to   the   Present   Times.     By 

As.-  :.?.iz5  ^zxxrjfGS,  M.A.     izmo,  cloth,  red  edge. 

The  Gospel  and  the  Age.  Sermons  on  Special  Occasions. 
By  W.  C.  Mac-ee,  D.D.,  Lord  Bishop  of  Peterborough. 
Crovn  octaro,  cloth,  ^.00. 

The  Spirit  in  Prison,  and  Other  Studies  on  the  Life  After 
Death.  By  E.  H.  Plumftre,  D.D.  J^rm  amd  Reviied 
BOiom,  Fifth  Tkousamd     Crovn  octavo,  cloth,  $2.00. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        -        New  York. 


II 


The   Theolosfical    Educator. 


REV.  W.  ROBERTSON  NICOLL,  MA. 

Editor  of  "  The  Exoositor. " 


Under  this  title  will  be  published  a  series  of  ^lanitals  which 
will  give  a  solid  and  trustworthy  grounding  in  all  branches  cf 
Theological  study.  It  is  remarkable  that,  while  such  works  on  lit- 
erature and  science  abound,  the  field  in  Theology  is  still  unoccupied. 

The  books  will  be  written  by  men  recognized  as  authorities 
on  their  subjects.  They  will  be  sp)€cially  adapted  to  the  needs  of 
those  preparing  for  examinations  in  Theology,  as  ■well  as  fcr  pop- 
ular instruction. 

While  the  manuals  will  be  specially  useful  to  Theological 
Students,  the  clearness  and  simplicity  of  their  style  will,  it  is  hoped, 
attract  the  many  laymen  interested  in  these  subjects  ;  while  their 
freshness  and  scholarship  will  make  them  interesting  even  to  pro- 
ficients in  Theology. 

The  price  of  each  Manual  will  re  75  ce-:s.  ne: :  zzlz  -^^-ill  ze 
published  at  short  intervals.  E^r.v  criers  solicited  for  eirlier 
sinsle  vclunes  cr  the  entire  set. 


IVOJr  F.£AZ)V. 

A  Manual  of  Christian  Evidences.     3y  the  Rev.  Prsbex- 
DARV  Row,  M.A. 

"It  disccLsses  the  principal  caestions  inTolTed  ii  2.  Tii^ro~s  a-ti  ro^^ar 
style.  It  is  an  admirable  conipeni  a:ii  wonhv  c:  2.  ^ie  ci-cdiUoa." — Tijt 
Intsrior,  Oucago. 

An  Introduction  to  the  Textual  Criticism  of  the  New 

Testament.     By  the  Rev.  Prof.  B.  B.  Wasj^ikld,  D.D. 

"  It  sappUes  i»ecisely  the  handJMok  wtiidi  tesidieis  in  tlus  field  caa  place 
in  the  hands  of  their  stndoits,  onfident  of  its  acvrriiacy  and  cooibrmitf  to  tke 
latest  and  best  sooices  tA  infonnatioo." — Tke  Xraa  Ett^amier. 


A  Hebrew  Grammar.  By  the.  Rev.  W.  H.  Lowe,  M.A„  Joint- 
Author  of  "A  Commentary  on  the  Psalms,"  (Sec,  &:c.;  Hebrew 
Lecturer,  Christ's  College,  Cambridge. 

"It  is  well  furnished  with  tables  and  pedigrees,  and  with  a  Bible  and 
dictionary  at  hand  the  student  will  find  most  of  the  barriers  to  his  progress  re- 
moved,"—  The  Independent. 

A  Manual  of  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer,  showing  its 
History  and  Contents.  By  the  Rev.  Charles  Hole,  B.A., 
Professor  at  King's  College,  London. 

A  Manual  of  Church  History.  In  Two  Parts.  By  the  Rev. 
A.  C.  Jennings,  M.A.,  Author  o;  "  Ecclesia-Anglicana," 
&c. 

The  Apostle's  Creed.  By  the  Rev.  J.  E.  Yoxge,  M.A.,  late 
Fellow  of  King's  College,  Cambridge  ;  and  Assistant  Master 
in  Eton  Coliege. 


/JV    PREPARATION. 

A  Grammar  of  New  Testament  Greek.  By  the  Rev. 
William  Henry  Simcox,  M. A.,  late  Fellow  of  Queen's  Col- 
lege, Oxford,  &c. 

An  Introduction  to  the  Old  Testament.  By  the  Rev.  C. 
H.  H.  Wright,  D.D.,  late  Bampton  Lecturer,  &c. 

An  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament.  By  the  Rev. 
Marcus  Dods,  D.D. 

The  Thirty-Nine  Articles.  By  the  Rev.  H.  C.  G.  Moule, 
M..A.,  Principal  of  Ridley  Hall,  Cambridge. 

Preaching.     By  the  Rev.  Canon  S.  Reynolds  Hole,  M.A. 

A  Guide  to  Theological  Literature.  By  the  Rev.  Marcus 
Dods,  D.D.,  and  the  Editor. 


THOMAS  WHITTAKER, 
2  and  3  Bible  House,        -        -        New  York. 


'rinceton 


neological  Seminary  Librari 


nary  Libraries 


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